So, since I hear from a lot of people (on here and irl) that Linux has a 'very high learning curve', let me share my experiences with the first time my dad touched Linux (Elementary OS) without me interfering at all! (keep in mind that he is very a-technical)

*le me boots the system* (I already did setup a user account for him and gave him the password).

Dad: *enters password and presses enter*
Me: "Hmm that went faster than expected."
Dad: "Uhm I know how to login son, it's not that hard and pretty obvious".
Me: "Alright, why don't you try to open up the default word documents editor on here! I'll be right back!"
Me: *Goes away and returns after a minute*.
Dad: *already a few test sentences typed in LibreOffice writer* it's going pretty well :)!
Me: "Oo how did you find that?!"
Dad: "Well, there's a thingy that says 'applications' so I clicked in and found it in the "Office" section, do you think I am blind or something?!"
Me: 😐. uhm no but I just didn't think you'd find it that quickly. Now try to install Chromium browser! *thinking: he'll fail this one for sure* I'll be right back :).
Me: *returns again after a minute or so*
Dad: *already searching for stuff through Chromium*
Me: "wait, how the hell did you do that so quickly, it's not the easiest thingy for most people".
Dad: "Jesus, it's not that hard! I went to the application browsing thingy, typed 'software' and then a sorta software store icon showed up so I clicked it and it opened a windows with a search bar saying something like 'search for applications/software'. clicked in it, typed 'chromium', saw it coming up, there was a very clear 'install' button, it asked for my password, I put it in and after a little it gave a notification that it was installed. Then I went to that application browsing thingy again and typed Chromium. Then I hit enter because it selected an icon called chromium...."
Me: O.o. Okay this is going very good, now open an email client and login to your email address!
Dad: *goes to application browsing thingy, types 'email', evolution icon shows up, dad clicks it, email address setup steps show up and dad follows them quickly. After about a minute, everything is setup.

I expected this to be a hard process for someone who dealt with Windows his entire life but damn, I underestimated it.
Asked him if he found it easy/what he liked about it:
"Well, it's very clear where I can find everything, default browser/email/word document editor programs are easy to find and that's about all I need so yeah, great system!"

I am proud of you, dad!

Today at work, still laugh thinking back to it!

We were on lunch break but the linux support engineers who are on the phones as well have to pick up calls anyways (very small team).

*engineer walks to the table, sits down: Ahhh rest, finally!*
*tringggggggggg*
*engineer pulls a face like 'oh for fucks sake' and walks back to his desk*
*puts headphones on and clicks the answer button just as it disappears*
"really!?! Alright lets finally eat now"
*sits for literally one second*
*tringgggggggggg*
*Engineer seems quite pissed off now. walks to his desk again, puts on headset, clicks the answer button JUST as the call stops again*
"Mother of god, fucking really?"
*stays as his desk for a minute or so, walks back, stays hovering above his chair for a little and finally sits down again*
"Finall......"
*TRINGGGGGGGGGGGG*
"MOTHERFUCKER. THESE GUYS TIME IT OR SOMETHING!?!?"
*walks back to his desk very frustrated this time*
*puts on headphones very quickly and presses the answer button*
*answer works but the call is literally dropped the second he starts it (it was a real client)*

"OH FOR FUCKS FUCKING FUCKING FUCKING SAKE FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK"

*walks back to table again and sits down. Takes sandwich and....*

*TRINGGGGGGGGGG MOTHERFUCKER*

"FUCKING COCKSUKING MOTHERFUCKING PIECES OF WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK EVER"

*gives a deadly look to another engineer: "I am NOT going to take it this time! En-fucking-joy."*

We laughed so hard xD

Watching normal people use a computer is incredibly painful.
* slow typing
* slow mouse movements
* mouse is used for everything
* instead of hitting the back button, they'll load up a website and go through 6 pages again.
* no shortcuts!

Someone lost their tabs today (Windows crashed), so I said "press ctrl + shift + T". They were so amazed that keys could do something so advanced.
Dhcosncowhtoehwurt hrnxkxxhry he.

Honestly, if people learned how to use keyboards to their full potential, they could shave off 1-2 hours of their normal work PER DAY!

Tldr :
Office Building : 1
Population: 5000
Number of PC users: 5000
No of Spare mice: 0

Day 1:
Training period commences.
My mouse laser sensor doesn't work.

Solution: Use this mouse to log in to your system.
Open the company portal.
Connect to vpn.
Enter username password.
Create a ticket for mouse replacement.
Done.

Day 3
I bring my own mouse.
Confiscated at security.
Becomes a security violation.

Day 9
I get a call from helpdesk.
Agent- what is the problem?
Me- my mouse is not working.
Agent- why?
Me- what do you mean? Something is wrong with the sensor.
Agent- clean the sensor.
Disconnects call.
Marks ticket as resolved.
Me- WTF just happened!

Naturally, I escalate the issue.

Day 15
Level 2 Agent- what happened? Why have you escalated the issue?
Me- I need a mouse, waiting since 2 weeks.
Him- No mouse is available
Me- you don't have a single spare mouse available in an office with 5000 PC users?
Him- no they're out of stock.
Me- when will it be back in stock?
Him- we will 'soon' launch a tender for quotations from sellers.
Me- time?
Him- 1 week.

Day 34

I email the head of supplies for the city office. Next day I get a used super small mouse, which doesn't have a left button. Anyways, I've given up hope now.

Day 45
I become a master at keyboard shortcuts.
Finish my training.
Get transferred to another city.
No mouse till date.

Surprisingly, this was one of the top recruiters in my country. Never knew, MNCs can be so so inefficient for such simple tasks.
Start-ups are way better in this regard. Latest tech, small community, minimal bureaucracy and a lot of respect and things to learn.

Manager: This button is too dark, you need to lighten it. Have you no sense of design?

Dev: …

Dev: Hows this for an adjustment?

Manager: Wayyyyy too light now, jesus you need glasses if you think that’s good.

Dev: …

Dev: How about now?

Manager: It’s close, make it just a little more dark. God why does this have to take so long, do I have to hold your hand through this entire process!

Dev: …

Dev: There that good?

Manager: Yes that’s perfect! Send me a PR immediately so I can approve, we need to get this out ASAP, it’s critical!!

Dev: I can’t.

Manager: ????

Dev: There’s no diff, you had me gradually adjust the colour back to exactly what it was originally.

Manager: THAT’S IMPOSSIBLE IT LOOKS COMPLETELY DIFFERENT. HOW DARE YOU INSULT ME LIKE THIS, I HAVE A MEETING I NEED TO GET OFF TO BUT WE WILL BE HAVING WORDS LATER ABOUT THIS INAPPROPRIATE BEHAVIOUR.

Dev: …

Boss: Can we add a [Close] button at the top right of the modal instead for all the items, the back at the lower left seems out of place.

Me: What modal? You mean move the back button to the top right of the page?

Boss: And make it say [Close]

Me: But it navigates Back. It's not a modal so it doesn't close. [Back] makes more sense than [Close].

Boss: Ok
...
Boss: Change the [Back] on the modal to [Close].

Me: But... fine...

Buttons all now say "Close", they all have double quotes. No one has said anything.

I was 15 years old and the first year of high school. Everything was new to me and I was such a newbie. At that time I had 2-3 year of programming behind me at an institution where they taught competitive programming. And I knew something about computers. Not much but more than most of my school mates. At that time I wanted to become "super cool hacker".

So we had this very very thought teacher for history which was also our form master. She really knows how to explained everything about history and in an interesting way. But while she was teaching we also had to write down notes from her powerpoints that were on a projector. And occasionally she would wait for us to copy everything and then move on with her lecture. But sometimes she didn't. This was frustrating as hell. The whole class would complain about this because you couldn't take notes down normal, you had to do it at double speed.

But she got one weak spot. She was not very good with computers. Our school computers were locked in some kinda closet so that students didn't have physical access to a computer and were also password protected. So I came up with the plan to plant wireless mouse in her computer so that I could control her mouse. At that time it seemed like SUPER HACKER MASTER PLAN.

So I got an opportunity one time when she left the classroom and let closet where the computer was open. I quickly sneaked the USB of the wireless mouse in the computer and then go back to the seat.

So THE FUN began.

Firstly I would only go back in powerpoint so that all my schoolmates could write down notes including me. And it was hilarious to watch when she didn't know what is happening. So then I would move her mouse when she tried to close some window. I would just move it slightly so she wouldn't notice that somebody else is controlling mouse. And by missing X button just by slight she would click other things and other things would pop up and now she had to close this thing so it became a nightmare for her. And she would become angry at the mouse and start complaining how the computer doesn't work and that mouse doesn't obey her.

One time when she didn't pay attention to her computer and projector I went to paint program and drew a heart and wrote we love you (In Slovenian Imamo vas radi -> See the picture below) and one of my school mates has the picture of it. We were all giggling and she didn't know what is was for. And I managed to close everything before she even noticed.

So it got to the point where she couldn't hand it more so she called our school IT guy so that he would check her computer (2 or 3 weeks passed before she called IT guy). And he didn't find anything. He was really crappy IT guy in general. So one week passed by and I still had messed with her mouse. So she got a replacement computer. Who would guessed all the problems went away (because I didn't have another mouse like that). I guess when our IT guy took the computer to his room and really thoroughly check it he found my USB.

So he told her what was the problem she was so pissed off really I didn't see her pissed off so much in all my 4 years in high school. She demanded the apology from whom did it. And at that moment my mind went through all possible scenarios... And the most likely one was that I was going to be expelled... And I didn't have the balls to say that I did it and I was too afraid... Thanks to God nobody from my school mates didn't tell that it was me.

While she waited that somebody would come forward there was one moment when our looks met and at that moment both of us knew that I was the one that did it.

Next day the whole class wrote the apology letter and she accepted it. But for the rest of 4 years whenever was there a problem with the computer I had to fixed it and she didn't trust anybody not even our IT guy at school. It was our unwritten contract that I would repair her computer to pay off my sin that I did. And she once even trusted me with her personal laptop.

So to end this story I have really high respect for her because she is a great teacher and great persons that guide me through my teen years. And we stayed in contact.

I go to unlock my car, but the button I usually use is gone. Instead now it unlocks by long-pressing the car handle.

Ok, got it.

Then my ignition isn't there? Oh, it's in the middle of the steering wheel now? Ok.. but it doesn't work? Oh I have to sign in with Google or Facebook, alright...

Wait, where's my odometer? Oh this is "card" view, and I guess I want "compact" view, huh. Is there a dark theme? Guess not.

Why can't I shift? Oh the stick is a hamburger button now, weird. Um, and reverse is in a sub-menu? That's going to get annoying.

Alright just need to look in the mirror to see if.. wtf? You call this "responsive" or something? I can't see out that tiny window.

I'm very disappointed in all this, I wonder if I can roll back. Oh WHERE ARE THE BRAKES OH GOD

UX DESIGNERS

HAVE

FUCKING

KILLED ME

WHY DID WE TRUST THEM AND THEIR GODFORSAKEN UPDATES

In a user-interface design meeting over a regulatory compliance implementation:
User: “We’ll need to input a city.”
Dev: “Should we validate that city against the state, zip code, and country?”
User: “You are going to make me enter all that data? Ugh…then make it a drop-down. I select the city and the state, zip code auto-fill. I don’t want to make a mistake typing any of that data in.”
Me: “I don’t think a drop-down of every city in the US is feasible.”
Manage: “Why? There cannot be that many. Drop-down is fine. What about the button? We have a few icons to choose from…”
Me: “Uh..yea…there are thousands of cities in the US. Way too much data to for anyone to realistically scroll through”
Dev: “They won’t have to scroll, I’ll filter the list when they start typing.”
Me: “That’s not really the issue and if they are typing the city anyway, just let them type it in.”
User: “What if I mistype Ch1cago? We could inadvertently be out of compliance. The system should never open the company up for federal lawsuits”
Me: “If we’re hiring individuals responsible for legal compliance who can’t spell Chicago, we should be sued by the federal government. We should validate the data the best we can, but it is ultimately your department’s responsibility for data accuracy.”
Manager: “Now now…it’s all our responsibility. What is wrong with a few thousand item drop-down?”
Me: “Um, memory, network bandwidth, database storage, who maintains this list of cities? A lot of time and resources could be saved by simply paying attention.”
Manager: “Memory? Well, memory is cheap. If the workstation needs more memory, we’ll add more”
Dev: “Creating a drop-down is easy and selecting thousands of rows from the database should be fast enough. If the selection is slow, I’ll put it in a thread.”
DBA: “Table won’t be that big and won’t take up much disk space. We’ll need to setup stored procedures, and data import jobs from somewhere to maintain the data. New cities, name changes, ect. ”
Manager: “And if the network starts becoming too slow, we’ll have the Networking dept. open up the valves.”
Me: “Am I the only one seeing all the moving parts we’re introducing just to keep someone from misspelling ‘Chicago’? I’ll admit I’m wrong or maybe I’m not looking at the problem correctly. The point of redesigning the compliance system is to make it simpler, not more complex.”
Manager: “I’m missing the point to why we’re still talking about this. Decision has been made. Drop-down of all cities in the US. Moving on to the button’s icon ..”
Me: “Where is the list of cities going to come from?”
<few seconds of silence>
Dev: “Post office I guess.”
Me: “You guess?…OK…Who is going to manage this list of cities? The manager responsible for regulations?”
User: “Thousands of cities? Oh no …no one is our area has time for that. The system should do it”
Me: “OK, the system. That falls on the DBA. Are you going to be responsible for keeping the data accurate? What is going to audit the cities to make sure the names are properly named and associated with the correct state?”
DBA: “Uh..I don’t know…um…I can set up a job to run every night”
Me: “A job to do what? Validate the data against what?”
Manager: “Do you have a point? No one said it would be easy and all of those details can be answered later.”
Me: “Almost done, and this should be easy. How many cities do we currently have to maintain compliance?”
User: “Maybe 4 or 5. Not many. Regulations are mostly on a state level.”
Me: “When was the last time we created a new city compliance?”
User: “Maybe, 8 years ago. It was before I started.”
Me: “So we’re creating all this complexity for data that, realistically, probably won’t ever change?”
User: “Oh crap, you’re right. What the hell was I thinking…Scratch the drop-down idea. I doubt we’re have a new city regulation anytime soon and how hard is it to type in a city?”
Manager: “OK, are we done wasting everyone’s time on this? No drop-down of cities...next …Let’s get back to the button’s icon …”

Simplicity 1, complexity 0.

TABLE BASED WEB DESIGN

I was surprised there were no rants about this topic before I realized it was more than a decade back 😳

We've never had it better! So to help add a little perspective for all those ranting about what is unarguably the golden age for web developers... let me fill you in on web dev in the late 90's;

JavaScript was a joke. No seriously! - I once got laughed out of the room for suggesting we try use it for more than disabling a button - (I wanted to check out the new XHR request thingy [read AJAX]).

HTML was simple and purely a markup language (with the exception of the marquee tag). The tags were basically just p,ul,ol,h*,form inputs,img and table and html took 10 minutes to learn. Any style was inline and equally crude - anything that wasn't crude could not be trusted and probably wouldn't render at all in most browsers (never mind render correctly).

There were rumors of a style TAG and something called a cascading style sheet which were received with much skepticism since it went against the old ways and any time saved would be lost writing multiple [IE version specific] style sheets for each browser just to get it to work - so we simply didn't.

No CSS meant the only tags you had to work with to create a structured layout were br, hr and table... so naturally EVERYTHING was in nested tables! JS callback hell can't touch this! - it was not uncommon to have 50+ nested tables all with inline style in a single page which would be edited without any dev tools or linting.

You would spend 30 minutes scanning td tags until your eyes bled to find something, make a change, ftp the file to the server, reload the web page and then spend 10 minutes staring at the devastation on your screen convinced you broke
the internet before spotting an un-closed td tag with your bloodshot eyes.

Tables were not just a silver bullet - they were the ONLY bullet and were in the wild west!

Q: Want an inline form or to align your inputs left?
A: Duh table!

Q: Want a border with round-corners, a shadow or blur?
A: That's easy! Your gonna want to put that table in the center cell of another table then crop a image of the border into 6 smaller images to put in the surrounding cells... oh and then spend 10 minutes fucking with mystical attributes like cell-padding and valign to get them flush.

...But hey at least on the bright-side vertically & horizontally centering stuff was a breeze!

At age of 20, I got hired as junior dev at a mobile gaming company. We were 2 junior devs hired at the same time and one of our senior colleagues made a prank: he came in the office before us and rearranged our offices in a "funny" manner.

Two days later I waited for him to go home. I opened his PC case, removed the power button cable from the motherboard and then re-arranged everything back to normal. Well, I couldn't resist...

Next day he came into the office and, well, surprise... the PC was not starting. He went to the IT department and they spent 4 hours trying to figure out why it was not working. They replaced the CPU, RAM memory, including the PSU.

I had to go and tell them: "maybe it's the power button jack?!".

I got into some problems for that prank. Indeed I crossed a line, but what the hell... that was a bad IT department.

Whoever decided to put a "No to all" button in Notepad++, I wish you and your family a healthy and wealthy life. I hope you will get a pay rise and be successful in your career.

- Windows OS user after a long while. Closing a lot of files was a nightmare back then.

Lost the password to the main modem/router of our apartment (live in a normal flat of which the rooms are rented out to three students and me) which is in my room and tried to reset the fucker for a trillion times but couldn't get back in, the password didn't reset.

Took a closer look at the reset button and suddenly noticed some text under it saying "wireless connect". Then I noticed a tiny round "hole" above the reset text.

Fuck my sideways, I've been pressing the "wireless connect" button instead of the actual reset one every goddamn time 😐

I can now port forward again 😊

Welcome back to practiseSafeHex's new life as a manager.

Episode 2: Why automate when you can spend all day doing it by hand

This is a particularly special episode for me, as these problems are taking up so much of my time with non-sensical bullshit, that i'm delayed with everything else. Some badly require tooling or new products. Some are just unnecessary processes or annoyances that should not need to be handled by another human. So lets jump right in, in no particular order:

- Jira ... nuff said? not quite because somehow some blue moon, planets aligning, act of god style set of circumstances lined up to allow this team to somehow make Jira worse. On one hand we have a gigantic Jira project containing 7 separate sub teams, a million different labels / epics and 4.2 million possible assignees, all making sure the loading page takes as long as possible to open. But the new country we've added support for in the app gets a separate project. So we have product, backend, mobile, design, management etc on one, and mobile-country2 on another. This delightfully means a lot of duplication and copy pasting from one to the other, for literally no reason what so ever.

- Everything on Jira is found through a label. Every time something happens, a new one is created. So I need to check for "iOS", "Android", "iOS-country2", "Android-country2", "mobile-<feature>", "mobile-<feature>-issues", "mobile-<feature>-prod-issues", "mobile-<feature>-existing-issues" and "<project>-July31" ... why July31? Because some fucking moron decided to do a round of testing, and tag all the issues with the current date (despite the fact Jira does that anyway), which somehow still gets used from time to time because nobody pays attention to what they are doing. This means creating and modifying filters on a daily basis ... after spending time trying to figure out what its not in the first one.

- One of my favourite morning rituals I like to call "Jira dumpster diving". This involves me removing all the filters and reading all the tickets. Why would I do such a thing? oh remember the 9000 labels I mentioned earlier? right well its very likely that they actually won't use any of them ... or the wrong ones ... or assign to the wrong person, so I have to go find them and fix them. If I don't, i'll get yelled at, because clearly it's my fault.

- Moving on from Jira. As some of you might have seen in your companies, if you use things like TestFlight, HockeyApp, AppCenter, BuddyBuild etc. that when you release a new app version for testing, each version comes with an automated change-log, listing ticket numbers addressed ...... yeah we don't do that. No we use this shitty service, which is effectively an FTP server and a webpage, that only allows you to host the new versions. Sending out those emails is all manual ... distribution groups?? ... whats that?

- Moving back to Jira. Can't even automate the changelog with a script, because I can't even make sense of the tickets, in order to translate that to a script.

- Moving on from Jira. Me and one of the remote testers play this great game I like to call "tag team ticketing". It's so much fun. Right heres how to play, you'll need a QA and a PM.

*QA creates a ticket, and puts nothing of any use inside it, and assigns to the PM.
*PM fires it back asking for clarification.
*QA adds in what he feels is clarification (hes wrong) and assigns it back to the PM.
*PM sends detailed instructions, with examples as to what is needed and assigns it back.
*QA adds 1 of the 3 things required and assigns it back.
*PM assigns it back saying the one thing added is from the wrong day, and reminds him about the other 2 items.
*QA adds some random piece of unrelated info to the ticket instead, forgetting about the 3 things and assigns it back.

and you just continue doing this for the whole dev / release cycle hahaha. Oh you guys have no idea how much fun it is, seriously give it a go, you'll thank me later ... or kill yourselves, each to their own.

- Moving back to Jira. I decided to take an action of creating a new project for my team (the mobile team) and set it up the way we want and just ignore everything going on around us. Use proper automation, and a kanban board. Maybe only give product a slack bot interface that won't allow them to create a ticket without what we need etc. Spent 25 minutes looking for the "create new project" button before finding the link which says I need to open a ticket with support and wait ... 5 ... fucking ... long ... painful ... unnecessary ... business days.

... Heres hoping my head continues to not have a bullet hole in it by then.

Id love to talk more, but those filters ain't gonna fix themselves. So we'll have to leave it here for today. Tune in again for another episode soon.

And remember to always practiseSafeHex

I have a telephone headset with a "confusing" mute button. Sometimes it works normally, but quite often it will "double-toggle" (toggle twice as though I pressed it twice, which essentially has no effect) - so I'm either left muted or left un-muted, the same as before I pressed the button at all - so I have to press it again, sometimes several times, for it to actuary work.

While I'm at my desk, I have a visual indicator of mute status (a light that turns green for un-muted or red for muted), so I can easily tell if my mic is hot or not. My old headset had a nice audible beep reminder if I was muted, but the new headset? Nope, not-so-much.

I work from home, while my wife works at an office; so each morning she leaves, but I stay in the home office. I almost always see her off one way or another, usually doing or saying something funny as she heads out.

So, one day, I'm on a large conference call with a number of cross-team managers, and my wife is about to head out the door. With the meeting droning on in my headset, I was in the kitchen with her for a while helping finish clean up after breakfast and getting her ready to go.

She needed to pack an ice-pack for some reason, and for the random humor of it, I start screaming something to the effect of "GIMMIE YO ICE PACKS - GIMMIE ALLLL YO ICE PACKS - YEAH! YEAH! IMMA PUT MY BAAAAAAAAALLLLLS ON IT - WHOOOOOOOOO!"

During which time I am jumping around like a crazy person, including actually grabbing one of the ice packs, putting it down the front of my pants and screaming. Loudly.

It was after my own screaming I overheard more than one person yelling on the bridge line "YOU'RE NOT MUTED! YOU'RE NOT MUTED!"

I have seldom felt such raw, unadulterated panic.

I rushed back to my home office - yes, the green light is on my desk - my mic is hot. When I pressed mute at some point earlier in the call, it double-toggled, leaving me un-muted, and I never knew.

Even more embarrassing was the chat session I saw on my computer screen. It was from my manager (one of the managers on the call) - he had pinged me several times while I was in the kitchen.

It read something like:

hey, you there?
is that your phone
I think your phone isn't muted
mute
dude, mute
is that you?
MUTE!
did you just say balls?

one of our computers at work suddenly shut down. our boss panicked like it was the end of the world cause he knew we couldnt buy a new one and we desperately need the computer. when i came in he started telling me he's gonna pay me extra if i fix the computer

me: *checks cpu and finds out it was unplugged* u sure bout that?
him: hell yea, id rather pay u that buy a new one

*30 mins later*

me: *plugs it back in and pushes power button* its done

>> guess who's got extra money without any extra efforts yay

Dev: What do you think of the new version of the app?

Client: It’s great! We just have a couple notes of feedback we are working on compiling. We should have those to you by next week.

*Next week*

Client: We need another week to compile all of this feed back we are generating

*Another week goes by*

Client: Still working on it, it’s going to be a really thorough review when you get it though. No stone will be left unturned!

*2 weeks later*

Client: Here it is!

Attached: A word document with a single line of text “can’t nobody log in” next to a picture of the login screen with a red circle drawn around the login button

Client: Can you hurry up and action our feedback? We want to go live next week

Dev: …

I love my wife, i really do. But seriously.... STOP PULLING ME OUT OF THE ZONE for every tiny thing!

She:
"... can you make me a coffee"

Me:
"sure babe"

What i actually want to say:
"Its a fucking one button machine, do it yourself you lazy shit. And it takes me half an hour to go back this deep! Isnt it enough that i did all house chores made you dinner and took the dog out after working for 8 hours streight. You better give me some attention later tonight, since you should have more then enough power after sleeping all day! If i would at least get a compliment... GIVE ME COMPIMENTS."

I was in a public place on my laptop, and my laptop went into hibernation to save battery. I switched it back on and then the laptops BIOS came up saying that the battery was critically low, nothing bad here.

Instead of clicking continue, I decided to press "Diagnostics" instead. The diagnostics immediately began to run in the BIOS.

The screen began to show different coloured bars and patterns, obviously a screen test. Then a prompt appeared asking me if coloured bars were displayed. The options were yes and no, and a button saying "Exit" in the top right. Me, not wanting to do a full diagnostics on such a low battery, pressed exit.

The screen turned black, and then flashed red. The beeper on the motherboard began to beep at an ear-piercing volume. It sounded as if it was a bomb about to go off. Everyone around me stared and some people began to even panic. I tried switching it off by holding the power button but nothing was happening. People were just staring all around me.

After about 10 seconds, the beeping stopped and the screen displayed an error message similar to this:
"CRITICAL ERROR: Monitor test FAILED.
No user input was provided."

Moral of the story: Make your program account for all possible options.

I was at Leeds Central train station the other day, waiting for the platform to be announced on the screen in the main bit. I noticed a commotion to my right. There was a teenage girl screaming and writhing around on the floor, her mother was knelt on one knee trying to calm her. I walked over without thinking, I know nothing about Epilepsy or first aid, at a push I could probably figure out the recovery position from a faint diagram i have stored in the unused part if my brain...

(it’s where I keep the washing machine instructions, which incidentally were designed for maximum confusion, if Id designed a washing machine it would have 1 button labelled ‘wash’)...

Sorry, back to the story. So i walked over and just before I got there, with the mother looking directly at me, I realised, what the fuck am I doing, meanwhile the daughter was screaming still and writhing, a bit like a rapid angel print you would make in the snow as a kid (until your hand touched the dog shit).

I couldn’t help it, the words just came out, like a dumb fucker, i said ‘Has she got epilepsy?’ , i stood there waiting for the sarcastic comment or the murderous stare, even a fuck off would suffice, so that I could remove myself from the situation.

To my surprise, and shock, she looked at me, calmly and said “oh no, it’s not epilepsy or anything like that.... she’s lost her iPhone”.

Hey @Root! I know you won't have time to finish Ticket A before holiday vacation, so work on Ticket B instead.

I finished Ticket A in time. except for converting/fixing some horrible spaghetti monstrosity. More or less: "we overwrote this gem's middleware and now it calls back into our codebase under specific circumstances, and then calls the gem again, which calls the middleware again." Wtf? It's an atrocity against rationality.

The second day after vacation:

Hey @Root, drop Ticket B and work on Ticket C instead. Can you knock this out quick, like before friday? ... Uh, sure. It looks easy.

Ticket C was not easy. Ticket C was a frontend CSS job to add a print button, and for unknown reasons, none of the styles apply during printing. The only code involved is adding a button with a single line of javascript: `window.print()`, so why give it to the chick who hasn't been given a frontend ticket in over a year? Why not give it to the frontend guy who does this all day every day? Because "do it anyway," that's why.

And in somewhere between 13 (now 5) minutes and two hours from now, I'm going to have a 1:1 with my boss to discuss the week. Having finished almost all of Ticket A won't matter because it's not a "recent priority" -- despite it being a priority before, and a lot of work. I've made no progress on Ticket B due to interruptions (and a total and complete lack of caring because I'm burned out and quite literally can no longer care), and no progress on ticket C because... it's all horribly broken and therefore not quick. I assigned it to Mr. Frontend, which I'll probably get chewed out for.

So, my 1:1 with bossmang today is going to be awful. And the worst part of all: I'm out of rum! Which means sobriety in the face of adversity! :<

but like, wtf. Just give me a ticket and let me work on it until it's done. Stop changing the damn priorities every other freaking day!

So back in January 2015 I bought my first Mac and wanted to learn Swift. Coming from .Net C# IBOutlet was anew concept for me, had to search for how to make a button event and Google gave that 😐

**I just googled it for the sake of this rant but ya it happened 😅

FUCKING HELL
My sister has that Vaio laptop from 2012 and she wanted me to "clean it up"... You get the deal. I ran the bios and booted it up from my external SSD setup so I don't have to bother with her bloody Windows fucking 7. When I'm finished deleting some garbage she managed to accumulate on her disk I wanted to switch back to Windows to properly uninstall bloatware she had. AND THEN OT FUCKING STRUCK ME. Can't load bios. F keys don't do shit. Delete doesn't either. The bloody "ASSIST" button is as useless as always. Since the computer is so slow I'm gonna waste a whole day trying to fix it and in the end she will be like: "oh, it took you so long!". Why Vaio, why can't you just get over the fact that some people actually use BIOS and make it somehow ACCESSIBLE? It's the same shit every time I try to do anything with that laptop. I'm always getting shit on from Sony as if I paid them to fuck me. One last time. VAIO, FUCK YOU.

Boss comes to me with an idea, we use a spreadsheet to store certain sets of links for clients, sometimes with dozens of links, he wants us to be able to push a button and open all the links in the sheet. I'll admit I'm not exactly proficient in excel but said I'd look into it.

I came up with a macro which seemed to work for a while but there were a few links now and then that didn't want to open due to the way excel apparently checks the links prior to actually opening them. I told my boss that I'd look into a better solution but was slammed in office with scheduled projects.

I ended up taking time at home over the next week learning how to make this happen in Python. After a week I've got a CLI Python app which takes in an excel workbook and asks the user to select a sheet. Well employees don't like CLI so they asked for a GUI. I had never made anything with a GUI before since I'm not a software developer, anything I had previously written was written for me so it didn't need a GUI to be useful.

Spent another two weeks at home developing this thing and finally got a working solution. Now several employees are using my app as part of their daily job, saving them well over an hour of just clicking links in a spreadsheet.

Boss goes on a long rant about how he appreciates me and is thankful I was able to figure this out in my own time and save him money. So I say "If you really wanna show you appreciate me, you could approve that raise I've been asking for."

He replies, "Haha, yeah, but that's not gonna happen."

(I and THE back end developer, and I make less than the copywriting interns, time to start looking)

@dfox, feature request: swipe left/right to get to the next/previous rant. Sometimes I feel too lazy to press back button and go to the next rant. Swiping is easy.

(Edit: Not sure if it's been asked before. I'm kinda new here)

So here I am... thinking to myself how does this kid not know about the shift key?

Me: "Ok we're going to test see if you have sudo access. Please enter your password, now"
Student: ~stares at the black terminal box and begins pressing the caps lock key. The light doesn't display~
Student: "Um... what? Do I need to enter a new password?"
Me: "No"
Continues to click the caps-lock button and waiting for a light to appear on the keyboard. It doesn't. He continues clicking.
Me: "You need to press the shift button"
Him: "What???"
Me: "You need to press the shift button"
Him: "Um.. I don't understand"
Him: Presses shift button, nothing happens. Goes back to pressing caps lock button.
Me: "Your password has a capital letter in it right?"
Him: "Um... yeah."
Me: "Press the shift button to capitalize your letters."
Him: "I don't understand... Do I need to enter a new password?"
Me: "No... you need to press and hold the shift key to get a capital letter"
Him: "................................ ............................................ . . . . . .. .. .. .. .. .. . . . . . . . . . . . . ...................... . . . . . . . Oh..."
Him: "Presses and holds the shift button with his thumb and then presses the Z key."
Me: ~What in the hell are you doing?~ 🤦
Me: "Perfect it looks like you are a part of the sudoers list."
Me: "You can take you computer back."
Me: ~Do you fucking use the caps lock key to capitalize all the first letters in your sentences? Please tell me you don't!~

Microsoft, if I click the "Update and shut down" button it means I want you to update and shut down, not do a third of the update, shut down then wait for me to turn the computer back on for you to finish! Why can't it just do the update, reboot as necessary then shut down once it's all done?

Hashedram's compilations #1
List of most annoying website designs.

1) Pages with AUTO PLAYING VIDEOS.

Yes I'm looking at you Netflix. Along with every news website known to man. I'm looking to read a fucking article, so why would you even waste your money and bandwidth trying to shove a video of some shit I don't care about in my face, and make it follow me as I scroll down like a fucking insecure puppy. Also, fuck you Instagram.

2) Pages that redirect once immediately after you visit them, thereby fucking with the browser history and the BACK BUTTON just leads back to the same fucking site.

I mean, just why. Did you think I would just go "Hey the back button doesn't work so let's stay on the site and read their awesome content"?

3) Sites showing things in a SLIDESHOW, when it actually should be in a list.

Slideshows are for progressive stories or for showing lists where you don't care about what's in them. Top 10 foods that reduce weight. Slideshow 1/15. Fuck you.

4) LOOKS LIKE YOU'RE USING AN AD BLOCKER

Yes. Yes I am. No I will not turn it off for you, you narcissistic snowflake fuck. And don't even try to guilt shame me into turning it off, because I know you're just going to bombard me with videos of sexy singles in the area if I do.

5) Pages where I see the first 3 lines of an article and have to SUBSCRIBE to see more.

Yes. Brilliant fucking idea. A user wants to see what your site has to offer, so within the first three seconds, don't show him exactly that.

6) Looking up an article and having to read through the entire motivational life story of the author.

I just want to know how to boil eggs, not read about your journey across Africa learning how to make difference recepies using boiled rhino dung.

7) CLICK BAIT.

Title: School boy designs blockchain machine learning game engine

Actual Content: Tic tac toe program made using linked lists

Idea guy: Hey bro, I have an idea of an app that can teleport matter to any random place outside our milky way galaxy and brings them back at will

Me: okay??

Idea guy: This is d future of tourism in d world

Me: okay??

Idea guy: so this is whats going to happen, you sign an NDA, you build d app, and then i will give you an equity of 10% in it and run the business. This can be big. I will make you rich

Me: Geet the fuuuucckkkm oouttt or rather i build d app without a return button and send him to a black hole

**Just tired of this kind of conversations**

Don't cha just love it when you download your "native" desktop application to host a meeting, only to find out its actually a wrapper around a browser?

How did I find out? Well I innocently tried to drag and drop an image to share, only to have the browser open and render that file instead of uploading it, killing the application it was running behind it, closing the meeting for everyone on it ... and not even be able to access a back button to re-open the session.

viva la hybrid!

I've been fairly lucky with my bosses of late since I've progressed in my programming career. But my absolute worst boss was when I first started working in an office environment doing data entry. My boss at the time was terrible, and she was always against innovation or process improvement. She also always tried to make herself look good and taking credit for the accomplishments of others. If she screwed up it was your fault, and she was "always buried in email" so she could never respond to you for pto requests, or escalation of issues between departments. My whole family pretty much worked in various roles in the department and she fired my brother after my mother left the company for no reason, saying he was "sleeping", but I worked right next to him and he's tall and had to slouch just to comfortable see his computer screen since the same manager refused to approve work station improvements for him.

Our workflow was to receive daily spreadsheets of health care claims that we had to manually process and enter into the system. So being the lazy innovator that I am, and trying to find ways I can efficiently work, I delved into studying visual basic and programmed a few functions and tools in excel to analyze, highlight, and process some of the data since the claims on the spreadsheets always had a specific pattern. This was all before I had any formal education in computer science so the program was very basic and clunky but it tripled my efficiency. When I brought it up to my boss to spread it among the rest of our team so they could use it after a short 20 minute training, she struck it down saying any training or use of it would be a waste of resources since it was too technical and complex to be used and if I were to keep improving it or use it I would be fired. It was literally copy and paste from one spreadsheet to the other en masse and clicking a button to sort and fill in the blanks. Eventually I showed it to the director of the department when working on a large data entry project with her, and I was later offered a job as a technical analyst where I was responsible for the codebase that generated the reports for the department and specifically all the reports my old boss used where I would occasionally mess with her to get back at all the crap she gave me and my brother. Since all the reports were blind carbon copied to everyone, I would send out her reports on a delay while everyone else got them on time. It eventually got her in so much crap she had to step down as a manager. She still works in the same company that I started working at again earlier this year, and like the many careers she's ruined she eventually ruined her own within the company 😂

The riskiest dev choice...

How about "The riskiest thing you've done as a dev"? I have a great entry for that. and I suppose it was my choice to build the feature afterall.

I was working on an instance of a small MMO at a game company I worked for. The MMO boasted multiple servers, each of them a vastly different take on the base game. We could use, extend, or outright replace anything we wanted to, leading to everything from Zelda to pokemon to an RP haven to a top-down futuristic counterstrike. The server in this particular instance was a fantasy RPG, and I was building it a new leveling and experience system with most of the trimmings. (Talents, feats/perks, etc. were in a future update.)

A bit of background, first: the game's dev setup did not have the now-standard dev/staging/prod servers; everything ran on prod, devs worked on prod, players connected and played on prod, etc. Worse yet, there was no backup system implemented -- or not really. The CTO was really the only person with sufficient access. The techy CEO did as well, but he rarely dealt with anything technical except server hardware, occasionally. And usually just to troll/punish us devs (as in "Oops ! I pulled the cat5 ! ;)"). Neither of them were the most reliable of people, either. The CTO would occasionally remote in and make backups of each server -- we assumed whenever he happened to think of it -- and would also occasionally do it when asked, but it could take him a week, sometimes even up to a month to get around to it. So the backups were only really useful for retreiving lost code and assets, not so much for player data.

The lack of reliable backups and the lack of proper testing grounds (among the plethora of other issues at the company) made for an absolutely terrible dev setup, but that's just how it was, and that's what we dealt with. We were game devs, afterall. Terrible or not, we got to make games! What more could you ask for!? It was amazing and terrible and wonderful and the worst thing ever, all at the same time. (and no, I'm not sharing the company name, but it isn't EA or Nexon, surprisingly 😅)

Anyway, back to the story! My new leveling system also needed to migrate players' existing data, so... you can see where this is going.

I did as much testing and inspection of my code as I could, copied it from a personal dev script to the server's xp system, ... and debated if I really wanted to click [Apply]. Every time I considered it, I went back to check another part or do yet more testing. I ended up taking like 40 minutes to finally click it.

And when I did... that was the scariest button press of my life. And the scariest three seconds' wait afterwards. That one click could have ruined every single player's account, permanently lost us players ...

After applying it, I immediately checked my character to see if she was broken, checked the account data for corruption or botched flags, checked for broken interactions with the other systems....

Everything ended up working out perfectly, and the players loved all of the new features. They had no idea what went into building them, and certainly had no idea of what went into applying them, or what could have gone wrong -- which is probably a good thing.

Looking back, that entire environment was so fragile, it's a wonder things didn't go horribly wrong all the time. Really, they almost never did. Apocalypses did happen, but were exceedingly rare, and were ususally fixed quickly. I guess we were all super careful simply because everything was so fragile? or the decent devs were, at least. We never trusted the lessers with access 😅 at least on the main servers where it mattered. Some of the smaller servers... well, we never really cared about those.

But I'm honestly more surprised to realize I've never had nightmares of that button click. It was certainly terrifying enough.

But yay! Complete system overhaul and migration of stored and realtime player data! on prod! With no issues! And lots of happy players! Woooooo!

Thinking back on it makes me happy 😊

Fuck today.

Today I was supposed to go into work and set up a dozen or so units for beta testing (its been a year and a half coming)..

Got up nice and early to get a head start on things. Stubbed (and broke) my motherfucking toe, then spilled my cereal milk on my laptop.. subsequently spend the following 2 hours tearing down and cleaning my poor little lappy. Get her all put back together, starting to feel a little better about the day. Push the power button, and fucking nothing but a tiny little fan noise for half a damn second.

With this luck I don't even want to move, lest a magic falling anvil decides to adorn my head..

I use the ++ button to set a bookmark on rants with many comments. So when I come back I can start reading from the red ++.

In electronics there's 3 options.
1. You pay a small fortune to get something decent.
2. You pay a smaller fortune to get crap.
3. You build it yourself and it'll be nicely priced AND decent.

Why is that? I have no idea. Profiteering gluttons perhaps.

Case in point: my watch. A waterproof one, so you'd expect to be able to take it in the shower, which I often did.
But then, le wild drop from 50cm height occurred and the whole thing just popped open, with soapy water rushing in. Luckily it didn't short out, and I quickly evacuated it out of the shower and dipped it with my towel.

Then already I thought.. what the fuck is wrong with the designers of this thing?! I'm all for keeping the inner parts of electronics accessible for self-servicing. But in a waterproof watch you wouldn't expect the backside to pop right off and expose the bloody internals, would you? So that's one thing. While evacuating it I quickly figured that I'd want to remove the battery immediately.. except that fucking thing was screwed in place?! WHAT THE FUCK?!! Use those screws to keep the fucking backside of the watch in place you certified pieces of shit that designed this craptacular piece of garbage!!!

Finished showering, went ahead and troubleshooted the thing. Miraculously it still worked. Except that now the UI of the fucking thing is biting me in the ass. A single button on the watch is used to operate the whole thing, and get it to set itself to the correct time, get radio signal, go in sleep mode (where the watch stops ticking, for storage purposes) and activate itself again. So I dived into the manual.. and still couldn't get it to work properly. So it's got one button just like an iPhone, it craps itself when it's dropped just like an iPhone, its design is shit just like an iPhone, and it's completely unusable when it craps itself just like an iPhone.

And the manual... Oh fucking shit. It specifies that the watch is 3 bar water resistant, yet apparently you can't take it into the shower. 3 FUCKING BAR!!! That's supposed to enable you to take a fucking dive with it! And apparently you can't drop it either.. who would've thought, when they lock it with no more than outwards pressure from the back plate into the main body! How difficult can it be to use fucking screws, and to make it watertight put some rubber bands or whatever?!

CERTIFIED MOTHERFUCKERS!!!

And the watch, it's in the garbage can right now. Right where it belongs!!

Marketing once asked if we can add functionality to the site that would disable the back and close button on a browser...yeah

Most common UX blunder: Icons

FUCK icons. The big problem with them is they assume a level of familiarity with the product. Someone who has never seen a folder before won't know what a button with a folder icon on it does!

This can be remedied with text NEXT to the icon, giving the button a readable purpose. But guess what? THAT SHIT AIN'T COMMON ENOUGH.

Here's a good example for you; cars. I am familiar with cars, but there's some fucking icons that I can't even figure out. And imagine if you aren't familiar with cars? That's what happens all the time; there's a hundred unused buttons on a car's interior these days because painted upon them is an icon, and only an icon! And who the hell cares enough to take out the manual and finger through it until you find that specific icon. In my experience, almost nobody.

Let's bring it back to software. It's the most overlooked UX sin to have icons without labels or some sort of describing text. As programmers, you and me have seen and can instantly recognize thousands of icons. But to get the typical user's experience, load up a complex program like Blender (assuming you aren't familiar with it yet) and see if you can tell me what all of the icons mean. Or don't, here's a screenshot from Blender 2.8 Beta. None of these icons have any labels.

Fucking frustrating, isn't it?

Don't rely on tooltips! Nobody wants to hover over every fucking icon and wait for it to pop up just to find what they're fucking looking for! Don't forget that a lot of users DON'T EVEN KNOW THEY EXIST! (This number isn't shrinking as fast as you'd expect with the newer generations, because many of the newer generations use touch devices where tooltips don't exist at all)

There's my UX rant. Remember that users are afraid to click things which they don't know what they do. For the most positive user experience, give users something to read; a way to understand what the fuck is going on without experimenting, and without waiting for the tooltip to appear.

Worst code review experience?

Hard to pick just one, but most were in a big meeting room with 4+ other developers not related to the project and with some playing Monday-Morning-Quarterback instead of offering productive feedback.

In one code review, the department mgr reviewed the code from a third party component library.

<brings up the code on the big screen>
Mgr: "I can't read any of this, its a mix of English and something else."
Me: "Its German."
Mgr: "Then why is 'Button' in English? This code is a mess."
Me: "I'm not exactly sure how I should respond, I mean, I didn't write any of this code."
Mgr: "Yes, but you are using it, so it's fair game for a code review."
Me: "Its not really open source, but we can make requests if you found something that needs to be addressed."
Mgr: "Oh yes, all this...whatever this is..<pointing again to the German>"
Me: "I don't think they will change their code to English just so you can read it."
Mgr: "We paid good money, you bet your ass they'll change it!"
Me: "I think the components were like $30 for the unlimited license. They'll tell us to go to hell first. Is there something about my code you want to talk about?"
Mgr: "<Ugggh>...I guess not, I couldn't get past all that German. Why didn't we go with an American company? Hell, why didn't we just write these components ourselves!?"
Me: "Because you gave a directive that if we found components that saved us time, to put in a request, and you approved the request. The company is American, they probably outsourced or hired German developers. I don't know and not sure why we care."
Mgr: "Security! What if they are sending keystrokes back to their servers!"
Me: "Did you see any http or any network access?"
Mgr: "How could I? The code is in German!"
Monday-Morning-Quarterback1: "If it were me, I would have written the components myself and moved on"
Me: "No, I don't think you could for less than $30"
Monday-Morning-Quarterback2: "Meh...we get paid anyway. Just add the time to the estimate."
Mgr: "Exactly! Why do we even have developers who can't read this mess."
Me: "Oh good Lord! Did anyone review or even look at my code for this review!?"
<silence>
Mgr: "Oh...ok...I guess we're done here. Thanks everyone."
<everyone starts to leave>
Me: "Whoa!...wait a sec..am I supposed to do something?"
Mgr: "Get that company to write their code in English so we can read it. You have their number, call em'...no...wait...give me their number. You keep working, I'll take care of this personally"

In they nicest way possible, the company did tell him to go to hell.

That moment when you accidentally click on upvote button & click it back to undo it & then, clicking it again so the person who posted doesn't feel bad.

Best part about the covid19 manufactured crisis?
Liquor stores deliver. Worst part about liquor stores delivering? Needing to use their shoddy websites.

I've been using a particular store (Total Wines) since they're cheaper than the rest and have better selection; it's quite literally a large warehouse made to look like a store.

Their website tries really hard to look professional, too, but it's just not. It took me two days to order, and not just from lack of time -- though from working 14 hour days, that's a factor.

Signing up was difficult. Your username is an email address, but you can't use comments because the server 500s, making the ajax call produce a wonderfully ambiguous error message. It also fades the page out like it's waiting on something, but that fade is on top of the error modal too. Similar error with the password field, though I don't remember how I triggered it.

Signing up also requires agreeing to subscribe to their newsletter. it's technically an opt-in, but not opting-in doesn't allow you to proceed. Same with opting-in to receiving a text notification when your order is ready for pickup -- you also opt-in to reciving SMS spam.

Another issue: After signing up, you start to navigate through the paginated product list. Every page change scrolls you to the exact middle of the next page. Not deliberatly; the UI loads first, and the browser gets as close as it can to your previous position -- which was below that as the pagination is at the bottom -- and then the products populate after. But regardless of why, there is no worse place to start because now you must scroll in both directions to view the products. If it stayed at the very bottom, it would at least mean you only need to scroll upwards to look at everything on the page. Minor, but increasingly irritating.

Also, they have like 198 pages of spirits alone because each size is unique entry. A 50ml, 350ml, 500ml, 750ml, 1000ml, and 1750ml bottle of e.g. Tito's vodka isn't one product, it's six. and they're sorted seemingly randomly. I think it's by available stock, looking back.

If you fancy a product, you can click on it for a detail page. Said detail page lists the various sizes in a dropdown, but they're not sorted correctly either, and changing sizes triggers a page reload, which leads to another problem:

if you navigate to more than a few pages within a 10 or so second window, the site accuses you of using browser automation. No captcha here, just a "click me for five seconds" button. However, it (usually) also triggers the check on every other tab you have open after its next nagivation.

That product page also randomly doesn't work. I haven't narrowed it down, but it will randomly decide to start failing, and won't stop failing for hours. It renders the page just fine, then immediately replaces it with a blank page. When it's failing, the only way to interact with the page is a perfectly-timed [esc], which can (and usually does) break all other page functionality, too. Absolutely great when you need to re-add everything from a stale copy of your signed-out cart living in another tab. More on that later. And don't forget to slow down to bypass the "browser automation" check, too!

Oh, and if you're using container tabs, make sure to open new tabs in the SAME container, as any request from the same IP without the login cookie will usually trigger that "browser automation" response, too.

The site also randomly signs you out, but allows you to continue amassing your cart. You'd think this is a good thing until you choose to sign in again... which empties your cart. It's like they don't want to make a sale at all.

The site also randomly forgets your name, replacing it with "null." My screen currently says "Hello, null". Hello, cruft!

It took me two days to order.
Mostly from lack of time, as i've been pulling 14 hour shifts lately trying to get everything done. but the sheer number of bugs certainly wasted most of what little time i had left. Now I definitely need a drink.

But maybe putting up with all of this is worthwhile because of their loyalty program? Apparently if you spend $500, you can take $5 off your next purchase! Yay! 1%! And your points expire! There are three levels; maybe it gets better. Level zero is for everyone; $0 requirement. There are also levels at $500 and $2500. That last one is seriously 5x more than the first paid level. and what does it earn you? A 'free' magazine subscription, 'free' classes (they're usually like $20-$50 iirc), and a 'free' grab bag (a $2.99 value!) twice per month. All for spending $2500. What a steal. It reminds me of Candy Crush's 3-star system where the first two stars are trivial, and the third is usually a difficult stretch goal. But here it's just thinly-veiled manipulation with no benefit.

I can tell they're employing some "smarketing" people with big ideas (read: stolen mistakes), but it's just such a fail.

The whole thing is a fail.

Sister: *walks up to me at my desk* Hey, I was wondering if you can undo what you did to the internet and put it back and make it work better in my room and also make it faster
Me: Sure

Yeah, I’ll get right on it and go hit the fucking magic button in the router settings called “enable extended range and make it go faster”.

Holy fuck the Instagram Android app has the WORST UX I've ever encountered!

I'm a professional Android developer and my girlfriend had to explain how to see a specific "story" more than once; IE; tap on it until it rotates round to the first! But tapping on a video post turns on the sound! What kind of dog shit for brains moron designed those interactions to be the same?

I can navigate around the app until all but one of the tabs displays a profile page when I navigate back to it. Lost much?

The center tab breaks that but only because it opens up a whole new screen out of nowhere, (bye bye bottom bar!) which repeats the "photo capture" that you can also get by swiping left on the left most tab!

Don't even get me started on the swiping! None of the tabs swipe between each other, like the convention, oh no. But some of them can swipe, yes!

The first tab swipes left and right, where the hell do they go you ask? Look for the obscure icons at the top (oh and bye bye bottom bar again!). The forth tab swipes but only to the left, they have text tabs like standard. That screen that comes up out of nowhere I mentioned? That can swipe too, but now the text tabs are at the bottom for god knows what reason as the top is empty!

On the profile tab we have more tabs. These are icon tabs inside the content now. The first two change the post content from a feed style to a grid, okay, so far so good. The other two? You'd imagine they also change how you view content right? Nope, one shows your favorites, and the other replaces the whole screen with a "photos of you" screen! With not only the bottom bar still showing, but an up button! Where the fuck do we go "up" to on the home screen??

Then we have the bookmark icon on the toolbar, which opens up a new screen "Saved", guess where that tabs are this time? They're back at the top! You know why? Because the navigation bottom bar is still there!! And there's an up button!!

At this point I'm just about ready to kill myself using this fucked up, backwards facing, ass for a face app that is somehow one of the most popular platforms on the earth, yet seems to have been made by five different designers on opposite ends of the planet!

FUCK ME!!

fucking hostgator!

go suck a cock you developers!

everything from their payment system to their support is crap.

a few days ago, i purchased a website from hostgator, with a year of hosting during black friday weekend. i had obtained a black friday coupon code that entitled me to roughly $160 off its usual price. that said, i filled out the registration form and clicked the 'checkout' button.

right after i clicked it, i saw i forgot to put in the coupon code, and pressed the back button on my browser. then i put in the code and proceeded with checkout.

guess what?

those MOTHERFUCKING GREEDY ASS BITCHES charged me TWICE, one with the coupon and one without.

i contacted customer support and told them what happened after waiting about double the time i was supposed to be connected to support.

of course, they asked for my fucking "security" pin over the customer support live chat (totally not ironic).

they sent a confirmation email, and cancelled the payment without the coupon.

then ONE FUCKING DAY LATER, I tried to connect to my website.

MY SITE WAS FUCKING SUSPENDED.

die in a hole.

i contacted customer support once more, and after explaining the story, I had to wait four to eight hours.

i'll see how it turns out tomorrow.

die in a hole hostgator🖕

!!oracle

I'm trying to install a minecraft modpack to play with a friend, and I'm super psyced about it. According to the modpack instructions, the first step is to download the java8 jre. Not sure if I actually need it or not, but it can download while I'm doing everything else, so I dutifully go to the download page and find the appropriate version. The download link does point to the file, but redirects to a login page instead. Apparently I need an oracle account to download anything on their site. stupid.

So I make an account. It requires my life story, or at least full name and address and phone number. stupid. So my name is now "fuck off" and I live in Hell, Michigan. My email is also "gofuckyourself" because I'm feeling spiteful. Also, for some reason every character takes about 3/4ths of a second to type, so it's very slow going. Passwords also cannot contain spaces, which makes me think they're doing some stupid "security" shenanigans like custom reversible encryption with some 5th grade math. or they're just stupid. Whatever, I make the stupid account.

Afterwards, I try to log in, but apparently my browser-saved credentials are wrong? I try a few more times, try enabling all of the javascripts, etc. No beans. Okay, maybe I can't use it until I verify the email? That actually makes some sense. Fine, I go check the throwaway inbox. No verification email. It's been like five minutes, but it's oracle so they probably just failed at it like everything else, so I try to have them resend the email. I find the resend link, and try it. Every time I enter my email address, though, it either gives me a validation error or a server error. I try a few mores times, and give up. I try to log in again; no dice. Giving up, I go do something else for awhile.

On a whim later, I check for the verification email again. Apparently it just takes bloody forever, but it did show up. Except instead of the first name "Fuck" I entered, I'm now "Andrew", apparently. okay.... whatever. I click the verify button anyway, and to my surprise it actually works, and says that I'm now allowed to use my account. Yay!

So, I go back to the login page (from the download link) and enter my credentials. A new error appears! I cannot use redirects, apparently, and "must type in the page address I want to visit manually." huh? okay, i go to the page directly, and see the same bloody error because of course i do because oracle fucking sucks. So I close the page, go back to the download list, click the link, wait for the login page redirect (which is so totally not allowed, apparently, except it works and manual navigation does not. yay backwards!), and try to log in.

Instead of being presented with an error because of the redirect, it lets me (try to) log in. But despite using prefilled creds (and also copy/pasting), it tells me they're invalid. I open a new tab container, clear the cache (just to be thorough), and repeat the above steps. This time it redirects me to a single signon server page (their concept of oauth), and presents me with a system error telling me to contact "the Administrator." -.- Any second attempts, refreshes, etc. just display the same error.

Further attempts to log in from the download page fail with the same invalid credentials error as before.

Fucking oracle and their reverse Midas touch.

Dear Chrome/firefox developers,

If someone presses the back button after they click on a link it means don't load that page and not go back to previous page.

Who the fuck came up with the idea of using SharePoint? What it even is?! Is it a website, wiki, document repo...?

Our version seems to be a broken wiki with no info content, old links, illogical navigation. And somehow word documents are integrated into it. Sometimes you see some weird calendar and timelines (from old projects). You can navigate into a folder, but you cannot get back. There's no ".." button?? You can map it like OneDrive to yourself, but Windows doesn't support any document version control. Where's the check in/out option from explorer menu??? I sure as shit have those for SVN, GIT etc. Is there a new version created everytime I press ctrl-s or only when I close the document?

Well, I could open the document in "online" mode. Ok, the formatting goes weird and everything is super slow. But at least I can fuck up someone elses document by accidentaly copy/pasting stuff, deleting lines, hitting my face into keyboard etc. There's automatically new version added!

Somehow you can enable the forced check in/out for documents. Obviously only the library admin can do that. And since he's just a program manager, he has no clue what the fuck is version control or document management. So he has this thing on his "things to do" list. For him, document management means sending various spec versions as email attachments. And the developers can figure out together who has the most recent one.

How did M$ push shit piece of shit to corporations? They even use this crap for the intranet making it slower than creation of galaxies. Though it's ok, since you cannot find anything from the intranet. It's all just head honchos blogs, seasonal greetings and stock market statuses. Nowhere is seen the downstairs cafeteria menu for the day. Or where to report for broken toilet. You know, stuff that 99% of people would like to see.

I complained to M$ about the SharePoint, but apparently there's no problem. You can code it yourself? Yeiii! So, instead of just updating some line in design spec, I have to take a 3 month class and get a MS sertificate, code some class-based-web-shit for 6 months and maybe, maybe then I can make the page/document look normal?

I am thinking, that I will just start writing my specs on paper. I will put them on the shelf and if you want to read it, you will check it out manually. And if someone else tries to edit it while you are editing it, you just cover the paper with your hands. There might be a requirement to make the document look more like MS Word, but that's easy to do. Just go to WC with the paper and wipe with it a couple of times.

Its been a few hours, and i was busy with meetings but

THANK Y'ALL FOR 10K ++

I remember wk20something, when i joined devrant. I was just starting a job as a data analyst, and the wk at that time spoke to me on a personal level, so i wrote a quick rant and didnt give it much thought. The next day i opened devrant and had like 100++s and a bunch of comments. Since then ive met a lot of awesome people here and im happy i clicked the install button back then. Thanks cfox and brogus for the opportunity, love ya.

Already got a longboard as a 10k-day gift :^)

I have a Windows machine sitting behind the TV, hooked to two controllers, set up as basically a console for the big TV. It doesn't get a lot of use, and mostly just churns out folding@home work units lately. It's connected by ethernet via a wired connection, and it has a local static IP for the sake of simplicity.

In January, Windows Update started throwing a nonspecific error and failing. After a couple weeks I decided to look up the error, and all the recommendations I found online said to make sure several critical services were running. I did, but it appeared to make no difference.

Yesterday, I finally engaged MS support. Priyank remoted into my machine and attempted all the steps I had already tried. I just let him go, so he could get through his checklist and get to the resolution steps. Well, his checklist began and ended with those steps, and he started rather insistently telling me that I had to reinstall, and that he had to do it for me. I told him no thank you, "I know how to reinstall windows, and I'll do it when I'm ready."

In his investigation though, I did notice that he opened MS Edge and tried to load Bing to search for something. But Edge had no connection. No pages would load. I didn't take any special notice of it at the time though, because of the argument I was having with him about reinstalling. And it was no great loss to me that Edge wasn't working, because that was literally the first time it'd ever been launched on that computer.

We got off the phone and I gave him top marks in the CS survey that was sent, as it appeared there was nothing he could do. It wasn't until a couple hours later that I remembered the connectivity problem. I went back and checked again. Edge couldn't load anything. Firefox, the ping command, Steam, Vivaldi, parsec and RDP all worked fine. The Windows Store couldn't connect either. That was when it occurred to me that its was likely that Windows Update was just unable to reach the internet.

As I have no problem whatsoever with MS services being unable to call home, I began trying to set up an on-demand proxy for use when I want to update, and I noticed that when I fill out the proxy details in Internet Options, or in Windows 10's more windows10-ish UI for a system proxy, the "save" button didn't respond to clicks. So I looked that problem up, and saw that it depends on a service called WinHttpAutoProxySvc, which I found itself depends on something called IP Helper, which led me to the root cause of all my issues: IP Helper now depends on the DHCP Client service, which I have explicitly disabled on non-wifi Windows installs since the '90s.

Just to see, I re-enabled DHCP Client, and boom! Everything came back on. Edge, the MS Store, and Windows Update all worked. So I updated, went through a couple reboots-- because that's the name of the game with windows update --and had a fully updated machine.

It occurred to me then that this is probably how MS sends all its spy data too, and since the things I actually use work just fine, I disabled DHCP Client again. I figure that's easier than navigating an intentionally annoying menu tree of privacy options that changes and resets with every major update.

But holy shit, microsoft! How can you hinge the entire system's OS connectivity on something that not everybody uses?

I wanted to play Pirates under DOS back then, but it didn't have the left-handed mouse button switch like Windows.

So I opened the mouse, scratched the PCB button lines away, soldered wires cross-over, and had a left-handed mouse also under DOS.

I was working on a site just moments ago and everything was fine. Then I move my laptop from my living room to my bedroom and on refreshing​ the page everything seems broken! Disorganized cards, and everything looks 10x bigger. I panic because I was supposed to deploy it on Thursday and I was just doing some final touches and angular has given me one hell of a time. I fucking rolled back all my commits to yesterday and cleared chromes chrome's cache....still nothing works. Then I realized there's a new button on my address tab and on clicking it is showed I had (accidentally) zoomed in by a fucking 175% when moving the laptop *facepalm*. On resetting it everything was ok. Now I have lost all of today's commits and my chrome cache. One box of tic-tacs down and I still can't overcome my rage... So I wrote this rant 😠😩😩
I need a stress ball😩😩

!Rant

Designer decide to have a meeting with stakeholders about UX/UI workflow for control panel of our new embedded system (no framework, no library, gui is bit per bit rendered on frame buffer).
A week later, still nothing on my table, not a mail, not a call. Meanwhile I wrote a framework, the control system, renderer, and messaging queues between tasks.
Wrote some widgets, a layout system and a view swtching mechanism, and a separate stack control to use a "back" button.

Now I am stuck for I do not know what should happen when clicking on various (non obvious) items on the touchscreen.
Fine, I'll ask the designer.

"Oh, I will write the workflow next week" (ETA time, 2 weeks. Seriously? You take a week to draw on Adobe Illustrator 20 screenshot with text and I have another week to write it from scratch in C?)
Ok, while you write it, just tell me what should happen when I click an active item.
"Well, we didn't talk about that. We just decided the colour of the icons on the screen..."
For fuck sake...

After months of development, testing, testing and even more testing the app was ready for deployment to production. Happy days, the end was in sight!

I had a week's leave so I handed over the preparation for deployment to my Senior Developer and left it in his capable hands while I enjoyed the sun and many beers.

I came back on the day of deployment and proudly pressed the deploy button. Hurrah!

Not long after I got loads of phone calls from around the country as the app wasn't working. What madness is this?! We tested this for months!

Turns out my Senior didn't like the way I'd written the SQL queries so he changed them. Which is obviously both annoying and unprofessional, but even worse he got a join wrong so the memory usage was a billion times more and it drained the network bandwidth for the whole site when I tried to debug it.

I got all the grief for the app not working and for causing many other incidents by running queries that killed the network.

So...much... rage!!!

Biggest GTFO moment of the year;

While applying for colleges, I created an account with a username and variant of my usual password (I know, bad move, sorry). I came back to finish the application but had forgotten what variant I had used. So I clicked the forgot password button and got an email with...

MY PASSWORD IN IT!!!!

Plain text password! Just as part of the email! WTF do these people think they are doing?!?!

I immediately changed my password to a random string and deleted my account, so hopefully when someone gets into this database my stuff with be overwritten... stupid programmers...

YouTube. Hate and love for it just like I would for an abusive partner.

Ads!
Wanna build a website with Wix? Fuck no!
Wanna manage WordPress over SSH? Fuck no!
.. well I kind of do but a turd remains a turd regardless of how it's maintained. WordPress can go die from a torture as long as the time everyone has wasted on it loading already. So no, I don't give a flying fuck about WordPress' new interface.
Wanna buy a new Samsung phone despite just having bought a OnePlus already? YOUTUBE, HOW ABOUT YOU GO FUCK YOURSELF AND YOUR SHITTY ALGO?!!

Quality videos though, so many engineering videos and all for free. How amazing is that? I quite like them.

But if I try to like a video and particularly the fucking comments on it, don't you fucking dare putting your fat fingers 1 pixel next to the like button, because then obviously you want to reply to the comment and have a pop-up with the whole comment and all its replies, and an automatically popped up text input field, just so you have to tap back 2 times just to try liking the bloody comment again. Rinse and repeat that 2 times at best, 5 times at worst. What's not to like, right?!

God fucking dammit. At least now I know why those random mentions without any meaningful other text are there in most comment sections. Usability over 9000!!!

I remember a few months ago at my school we all had taken the Chromebooks (our county's OS of choice) out and put them on our desks. We were in science, and we needed to take screenshots of websites for some reason. "Everyone go to the chrome store," our teacher said, with a look-how-smart-i-am kind of look on her face, "search for the 'Awesome Screenshot Extension.'" Ugh. This was dumb. I reluctantly searched it up and upon bringing up the description and about to press the "Add to Chrome" button, when I stopped, and made a decision I would later regret. Now, I don't really like this teacher, and she thought she was so fucking smart for finding this shit extension. I raised my hand, and she walked over. "Uhh… I'm pretty sure you can just do Ctrl + shift + []|| to take a screenshot" I said. She was fucking dumbfounded. She yelled out "Class, listen up! [Let's call me 'Ben' for this story] Ben just found an alternative [she was trying to make her extension not seem entirely useless, even though she knew it was] way to take a screenshot. Just press Ctrl + shift plus that box with the two lines next to it. You can use my extension or the one Ben found. Whichever is easier [she damn well knew which was easier]." Three times in the span of the next five minutes she said "just a reminder… you can use Ben's way if you want" to the whole class. Everyone kept looking at me. A few minutes later, she called me up to the computer which was being displayed on the big screen in front of class. She said some people were having trouble, so then pulled all the attention on me to come up to the front of class and demonstrate a goddamn keyboard shortcut. She was running windows 8, and I knew it wouldn't work on her computer. I pressed a few random keys on the keyboard and said "uhh, I think it only works on their computers" she let me sit back down. She couldn't handle the concept that different computers run different operating systems. I sat down and the guy sitting next to me raised his hand. He said "you could use the 'snippet tool'" Yes. Some people can. But she can't. I stopped him from doing anymore damage on their small brains by saying "uhh, it won't work on the Chromebooks, so that won't help." I hate that teacher. At lunch my friend came over to me. He has the same science teacher as me. "You know what she's been saying all day?" I was confused. "What?" I said. He almost started to laugh. "All day she's [the teacher] has been telling everyone that you found this amazing new technology in the Chromebooks. [Most of the students were smart enough to know that I didnt] she was like 'Ben, from my 2nd period found this amazing thing'" End of story. And guess what? I still hate her.

For the love of God. Please stop trying to make me download your shitty mobile app. I don’t have room, and I don’t want it. I just want to read the content that YOU SENT TO ME (looking at you, Quora). Nice way to make sure I unsubscribe and never come back. An unclosable pop up on mobile that just has a button to your mobile app while I have limited data and patience doesn’t do it for me. Fuck whoever came up with THAT brilliant decision.

->buying fake arduino from ebay.
->have to install separate drivers, because the manufacturer uses a cheap usb to serial chip.
-> driver page is all in chineese, only the download button is in english
-> installed the driver(at this point there was no going back)
-> rebooted
-> instand kereal panic
-> fuck_me.png

From 3 decades of operating system development, yesterday Windows shat itself (for the so many'th time) with the ACPI power button (how one can possibly fuck up interacting with a goddamn fucking pushbutton, I have no idea) and this morning I got back to my PC, only to notice that the USB driver (again one of the easiest and most ubiquitous protocols out there) shat itself as well. So wiggling the mouse to activate the screen? Of course, no says Windows. I can't possibly do that much, even though I'm developed by a team that could easily outnumber most distributions' development teams, and am part of a company that turns over fucking billions of dollars each year.

I feel that Microsoft offends the words "operating system" to the point that it should be changed (call me SJW 🙃), just for Windows. Shouldn't be too much of an effort considering that Microsoft never follows common standards anyway. I'd like to introduce you to the term "operating shitstain" 😜

Any thoughts on whether my alternative keyboard layout will lower my risk for wrist pain? I map each key to an Amazon dash button on each edge of a large bookshelf in my office. It's lots of exercise, and I'm almost back up to my old typing speed.

Have you ever had a problem with a partner, but you cannot prove at 100% that he has something against you? But you cannot stand him?

Well, this happened two years ago. I was working as a tester, and “John” (I won’t say his real name) was the dude who tests my tests, but in production.

I ‘m a sociable person, and I don’t mind talking with another people. Suddenly, I noticed that my co-worker started to behave a little bit... rude? Plain? I don’t know, but sometimes he didn’t answer my conversations/questions, or sometimes answered with extra-negative stuff.

“Well, his life is not easy” I said to myself. “Everybody haveproblems”, “I have to understand him and calm down”.

Two weeks later started to report really REALLY absurd production bugs, and with absurd I mean, for example, that he didn’t like the color of a button, a point next to a phrase, etc., things very very simples, but sometimes he ignored big errors.

Once I had to went out of the city for few hours, and asked to permission to go out. I had pending tests, but I left a document with specifications in case of emergency. Even passwords. Before I could finish the thing in the other city, my partner called me two times, and asking me obvious things! I had to go back to the office ealier that I had planned, so f*** angry 😡 and when I arrived to the office, John said “no, forget it, let’s solve it tomorrow” 🙃 WTF?!!!!!!

I decided not to argue with him.

Also noticed that his headaches suddenly increased, and looked so tired ☹️ I felt guilty to judge him

I felt so guilty, and even today I don’t know what to feel about that or what to think. I don’t work there anymore, but, What do you think? What would you do?

Coming back here after years to rant about... myself.
TLDR: I fucked up and now have to call a thousand people as a dev, I'm not even getting paid for it and they all get crazy about a random ID that got assigned to them, so now I want to throw away all my electronics and become a skilift operator.

Stupid me deployed a project shortly before we have the largest amount of orders in the year. (Like 90% of yearly orders in a couple minutes cause they are sold out fast and people wait to order first)

I got this horrible legacy "plain self written framework php" project which I tried to upgrade state of the art.
There was one piece missing to upgrade everything and nicely deploy it to some fresh new servers which can handle the high load which peaks at the time orders open.

So I did it the day before orders open and... everything worked well! Nothing crashed.
I wrote my client to wait a little before he confirms the orders, since after confirmation each of the people who ordered will receive an email where they can choose a unique number which they'll receive as a sticker with the order.

Since it's an event my client is promoting, people will meet each other wearing those unique stickers and being able to identify each other online and in person with this number.

Suddenly my clients call me that "customers are complaining about that there is something wrong"
Turned out he confirmed all orders straight away and that part of the application which makes the number unique was broken on the update.
So everyone could chose any number (also taken ones) as his "unique" number.

In my panic, I told my client "It's my mistake, I'll deal with it of course and call the affected people in my free time, since it's my mistake you don't have to pay for it". (it's my largest client by far, am a freelancer)
Realizing when people can chose any number it'll not be a few ones who have the same, it's like almost everyone did chose "69", "1", "420", "88 (a scary amount of people)",... (with 69 being the number being chosen by most people btw, even more then "1")

So now I have to call about a thousand people telling them a new random ID will be assigned to them. I thought of course about mailing them, wrote a script that deals with the issue automatically, and FUCKED IT UP TOO so everyone is confused and the only way to deal with it is by a call basically.
And while I'm sitting here now for 2 days straight calling people in my free time about their random ID will have to change, I realized that some people are quite crazy about random ID's.
I'm talking about yelling and threatening because "is it too much to ask for a working website when ordering this expensive product".

I hate my life right now and am getting quite serious about throwing all my electronic devices away and become a skilift operator instead. Fuck the higher pay, it's not worth the shit, I wanna have only responsibility about one button to press while watching people fall on their face.

So we are implementing a big and very complete localization management system on my company. The system has great features, indeed, but:

1. We cannot use the browser back button, because it is js and it appears no one cared about it (I am not a js Dev, but you can UAE the back button on my site that has js);

2. It is very customizable, but not intuitive. So you have one million options and you never know where to change what you need;

3. It has a save button everywhere, but most options are saved automatically, so you never know when you need to save. Actually, people from the webapp company use the save button as refresh, once we cannot use the browser refresh button;

4. Combo boxes load the elements while you scroll them, so to scroll to the bottom, you need to keep scrolling several times, waiting it to load the elements;

5. It does not allow you to open more than one tab of it at the same time. So if you need to see more than one information from different items, you need to navigate and wait the loading times to see what you need;

6. Emails are not sent in a different thread. So each action that send emails you need to keep waiting until the emails are sent (sometimes there are several emails sent in one action) to continue using it;

7. They not only store and send back your password by email if you loose it, but, as admin, if I click the button to send the user password to him/her, it keeps a copy of the email with the user password in my sent items;

8. To be able to send emails (they are really necessary), I need to include my SMTP info with login and password. So they have not only the system password saved, but everyone email login and password as well.

I am sure there is more, but I can't remember for now, and we are still trying to figure it out how to back our data, as it appears the only possible backup is their own.

So it would seem that Chrome no longer goes back a page when I press the backspace button.

In some ways it nice, as when i'm typing anything important I won't accidentally backspace myself out of the text.

On the other hand, now I have to reteach myself that Alt + Left Arrow is the only way now

Well, I was Always into Computers and Games and stuff and at some point, I started wondering: "why does Computer Go brrr when I Hit this Button?".

It was WinAPI C++ and I was amazed by the tons of work the programmers must have put into all this.

13 year old me was Like: "I can make a Game, cant be too hard."

It was hard.
Turns out I grabbed a Unity Version and tried Things, followed a tutorial and Made a funny jet Fighter Game (which I sadly lost).

Then an article got me into checking out Linux based systems and pentesting.
*Promptly Burns persistent Kali Live to USB Stick"
"Wow zhis koohl".
Had Lots of fun with Metasploit.

Years pass and I wrap my head around Javascript, Node, HTML and CSS, I tried making a Website, worked Out to some extent.

More years pass, we annoy our teacher so long until he opens up an arduino course at school.
He does.

We built weather stations with an ESP32 and C++ via Arduino Software, literally build 3 quadrocopter drones with remote Control and RGB lighting.
Then, Cherry on the top of everything, we win the drone flying Contest everyone gets some nice stuff.

A couple weeks later my class teacher requests me and two of my friends to come along on one of their annual teacher meetings where there are a bunch of teachers from other schools and where they discuss new technology and stuff.

We are allowed to present 3D printing, some of our past programming and some of the tech we've built.

Teachers were amazed, I had huge amounts of fun answering their questions and explaining stuff to them.

Finally done with Realschulabschluss (Middle-grade-graduation) and High school Starts.
It's great, we finally have actual CS lessons, we lesen Java now.
It's fuckton of fun and I ace all of it.
Probably the best grades I ever had in any class.

Then, in my free time, I started writing some simple programs, firstvI extended our crappy Greenfoot Marsrover Project and gave it procedural Landscape Generation (sort of), added a Power system, reactors, Iron and uranium or, refineries, all kinds of cool stuff.

After teaching myself more Java, I start making some actual projects such as "Ranchu's bag of useful and not so useful stuff", namely my OnyxLib library on my GitHub.

More time passes, more Projects are finished, I get addicted to coding, literally.
My days were literally Eat, Code, sleep, repeat.

After breaking that unhealthy cycle I fixed it with Long Breaks and Others activities in between.

In conclusion I Always wanted to know what goes on beneath the beautiful front end of the computer, found out, and it was the most amazing thing ever.
I always had constant fun while coding (except for when you don't have fun) and really enjoyed it at most times.
I Just really love it.

About a year back now I noticed that I was really quite good at what I was doing and I wanted to continue learning and using my programming.
That's when I knew that shit was made for me.

...fuck that's a long read.

My old job was great. I was writing automation software for one of the world's biggest storage deployments, and there was always a new challenge. But over time, I was asked to lend a hand with the tedious task of corresponding with procurement vendors and on-site technicians. At first it was one site, then it was two, and then it was an entire region of the US, spread across two time zones I'm not in.

I hated that work, and I found that I didn't have time anymore for software development, because of the time commitment the logistics work was. I was never hired to do logistics work, I was never trained, never qualified, and as I said, I hated it. I agreed to it to temporarily help out a weakness due to a shortage in staffing. But it never got taken off my plate, except for a short stint toward the end, just before I was placed on a PIP, because surprise surprise-- I'm bad at logistics.

About halfway through the PIP, I told my boss I wasn't doing it anymore. I said he could either put me back on software development or let me go, if ticket-monkeying and phone calls is the direction the wind is blowing for our team. I told him I had no intention of resigning, as you are not eligible for unemployment or severance if you resign, so their choice was to let me go. I'm told by people who are still there that everybody on the team is a ticket-jockey button-pusher now. Bleh.

My wife and I sold our old condo in Kansas City earlier in the summer, so we had about a year's worth of cushion, which was why I was willing to be let go. I was profoundly unhappy in my work, and it was bleeding through to my relationship with my wife and kids. So I took advantage of the time between jobs by spending more time with my family and just generally becoming a happier person again.

Meanwhile, I was in no desperate hurry to find a new job, so I got on linkedin, and had no more than two irons in the fire at a time. After just over two months I got an offer for a better job than before, which I accepted. There wasn't anything remarkable about that process though-- it's just something I've gone through recently.

Current task:

Somehow, one of my predecessors made some sort of custom hook tied to woocommerce check out that pipes some data into a nightmarish spaghetti fuck pile of undocumented wild west visual basic bullshit. It does this, presumably, via a set of parameters passed as plaintext in a url. I know this because I found the singleton that declares this. Helpfully, Mr. Fuckass named the class "Default", so I only have around 30k instances being kicked back by my IDE when I search for it. The only reason I "need" to find this, is so that I can just change the button to an href pointing at my own MS for shipping, and I need to change the fifteen params being passed to just one - a customer ID, which should be stored in the session, and referenced by a cookie. Once that is done, I should be able to freely delete a couple of gigs worth of bullshit. Been stuck on this for three days now. God forbid we have a test environment or something.

I'm tired. Can't even get angry anymore really. Can't even think of anything funny to say about it either, I just can't wait until this is done and I can go back to sleep.

Storytime!

I got a ticket near the end of the day, asking to install a printer on a computer. The branch in question was in a different time zone (I'm in US-Pacific [GMT-07] and the computer was in US-Eastern [GMT-04]). I figured I wouldn't worry about it; after all, I had other tickets to work on that were much higher priority.

The next day I come into work and immediately get a message from one of my East Coast coworkers, telling me that this branch is calling and asking how the printer is coming. I told him to tell them I would call them a bit later. I do a couple of easy jobs and then begrudgingly call the branch. I listen to the phone tree that they have (which requires two button presses instead of one in order to speak with someone) and finally get in contact with a person... only to have the call disconnect.

I call back and ask for the person who called in the ticket and then followed up, who had apparently gone to lunch. I informed the person that I was just going to install the printer and it would be good to go. This would be fine... up until she mentioned she needed scanning functionality.

Now I wasn't sure if the driver we have in AD is set up with the scan functionality, so I said okay, but that meant I would have to get the driver from the website. The connection to our branches are about 1Mbps, so even downloading Java updates (60-ish MB) take about 5-10 minutes on a good day. The file for this printer was about 700MB (thanks HP). So I went and did other stuff while that downloaded.

I come back after it finished and started the install process. Right away it asks to re-seat the USB cable. So I call the branch. The call disconnects. I call again. It disconnects. I call one more time, and finally get the person who called the ticket in. I instruct him to re-seat the cable. He does. The driver starts doing its thing. I tell him I'll call back if I run into any issues and we hang up.

The driver goes through the install process for about 20 minutes, stops at 99%, then fails. I want to restart the computer, just in case there's a conflict somewhere, but that would require calling the store again, so I put it off.

About an hour later I get a message from another East Coast coworker, telling me the branch is calling about the printer again. I was in the middle of another call and said I would call back later. I do. It disconnects. I call again, and get the person who called the ticket in again. I tell him I want to restart the computer, but wasn't sure if it was okay. He checks with the people using it, who says it's okay, so I reboot. I hang up.

Once the computer comes back up I start the install process again. It asks to re-seat the cable. Fuck. I don't want to call the store again, so I open notepad and say "Please take out the printer's USB connection from the back of the computer."

Three. Fucking. People. Saw it. They moved the window and one even tried to close it, but they didn't re-seat the cable. I opened another window, telling them to call me at my number. They didn't. I called them. Got disconnected. I called them again, finally got someone, told them to re-seat the printer cable again. They do, thank god.

I say thank you and hang up. Continue the installer. It stops at 99% again and fails. I reboot the computer; screw it, I'm just going to install the driver from Active Directory. Check Devices and Printers. It's installed successfully. Hallelujah!

I get the printer set up for the various programs they use and print a test page. I call them one last time; their phone system sounding like they were connected via an underwater line connected by tin cans. I get someone.

$me: Hi, I want to know if the printer has printed something.

$them (garbled): -et me shee... yesh, it -rint-d a *beezelborp*.

$me: Perfect, I'm going to close this ticket! Thanks, goodbye! *hangs up*

tl;dr - I hate printers

-GDPR
-News letter
-Ads blocker blocker
-Ads popup insite
-Ads popin in video
-Ads popin podcast
-Ads in mail
-Ads in software
-Ads in any android application
-Ads in windows
-Ads in ads
-Auto scrolling
-Slideshow
-Scroll position reset on back button
-Aria-label aria-labelledby aria-role aria-aria of game of thrones
-Order in dom for a11y different of the display order -Button :hover, :focus-visible, :focus-within :fuck-this
- SVG abandoned ware
- I make you a illustrators X version that not work with yours, i use figma. I use affinity, i use akira. I use photoshop, i use word. I use powerpoint, i use publisher, i use paint, i use all Asss (application as a service) on the web and to see what i make you need to pay you an account
-We all make frontend backend... No linter or something... Why we have always 848274 change in git ....
We not host anymore we use 62616 different cloud services to try all the fucking company everywhere
-Make a Drupal CMS to a client that's are to idiots to use it and call you each time they have something to modify

And goes on

Web tooday is fucking crap shit
People realize that you cannot make money anymore with informative website. Then everybody try to squish people at the last drop... Because of selfishness.

I can't believe it took me about 17 years to accidently press the back button on the mouse (mouse button 4?) when Visual Studio had focus. Apparently you can go back to the previous code file by using the back button...

QA: When I start the onboarding process, kill the app and reopen it, I return to where I left off with no way to go back to the previous screen.

Me: Please click the back button in the top left corner

TL;DR: OMFG! Push the button already!

I've been away on paternity leave for quite some time now. Today is my first day at work since the end of July.

Just a couple of days after my paternity leave started, I was contacted by one of the managers because a tracking and analytics service I had made some months earlier had halted.

Now, I did warn them that the project was fragile and was running of an old box in my office. So they shouldn't be surprized if it came to a halt every now and then.

Well, so being on my paternity leave and all I didn't want to spend time fixing it. I had a child to look after. So I told the manager that the box probably just had shut down. I think there was a power outage the day before, so I probably thought it was the cause. So he probably just had to turn it back on. I also told him the admin u/p in case he needed to restart some services.

Today, the CEO enters my office telling me to get that thing fixed. Because that manager apparently couldn't find the power button.

So today i got a call log from some users saying that they have "lost" the print page button when we made them switch from IE to Chrome, and I need to put the functionality back for chrome, after checking to see what print button they were talking about, because our system didint have the function to begin with, i realised they were talking about the print button on the IE toolbar that did not appear in chrome :/. The dev team had a good laugh afterwords.

PM and UX designer talks.

About a feature on android with viewpager (swipeable views) and a header with buttons.

PM : We need a back button and a close button on the header.
UX : A customer will be confused by both, with the swipe too.

PM : Then we need a close button alone.
UX : Customer will search for back button and not everyone might swipe left.

PM : We need a back button alone.
UX : Customer might not know how to close the view. He can't keep going back back back.

PM : we don't need any buttons.
UX : Customer should find it easy to close or go back.

PM : bruv.

Hell is not enough for people who create scripts that forcefully redirect you, while scrolling.

EAT A SPIKY CACTUS FOR EVERY DAMM TIME I HAD TO HIT THE BACK BUTTON BEVAUSE OF YOU

Haven't used dR for long so Idk how many people have already ranted about this...but here goes nothing.
ANDROID 10 NAVIGATIONS
Fucking irritating piece of shit !!!
Ughhh!
I can get understand the swipey swipe for back etc. But the "swipe up + hold " for recent apps just makes me cringe !!!!!
Ok, Some how you manage to open the recent apps by precisely fingering your phone.
You gotta go back to home screen from recents ??
Open a recent app then swipe up for home.
Two fucking gestures to go back to home screen !
Or click the close all apps button for home screen.
This is non sense.
Pls enlighten me if I am missing something.

I want the two button navigation back 😭

If you use software buttons, which side do you prefer your back button on?

Long story short: University fucked up single sign on.

For every online service I have, I set a different password, randomly generated ~ 20 characters long. At our university we have multiple systems but they offer a single sign on service which is quite nice because it is so non-transparent which service now uses which authorization. I changed my password a while ago and around the same time they also updated our mail client. Since then I am not able to log in which is not a big deal for me because I have mail forwarding.

Yesterday however I needed another service and also got rejected with my password. I knew from a friend that the passwords are fucked up and that some services have different restrictions (only 12 chars max.), so I decided to search how to reset my password. What the fuck was wrong with these people? It takes you five different pages to get the tiniest bit of information how to reset the password. Then on one page you can login with your single sign on and change the password. On that page you can also set the single sign on password, but if you enter an invalid password (in respect of the the other services) guess what? No feedback that you just locked yourself out of half the systems. Nice job. Also the password requirements are not next to the input fields where you change the password. Noo. That would be way to easy, remember the little small one line on the wall of text three pages ago? There you go.

Ok step one done. Now it should work, shouldn't it? Ohh no not so fast. One needs to activate the seperate service. Where you ask? Perfectly fine question. On the top of page four is a fucking one line table which looks like some five year old had some fun in excel. The button which takes you to the activation page is nearly invisible because of the non existing contrast. Also it is not a button but some arrow pointer thingy. Behind set arrow you have a page listing all differnt kinds of services, the description which you find on page two btw. No padding to decipher this shit what so ever. Nearly on the bottom is your needed button. Yes finally.

Finally I want to login, no good. Try again. Still no good. Go back to the fucked up excel table look at my username and think to myself what's the difference here? The table is so small and again no margin or padding. Apparently they cut of the last character of my normal username which i have which is fucking ridiculous.

What is wrong with you people, we are a TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY, is it so hard for you to find someone decend to unify this shit?

Four years ago while still a newbey in Android Dev and still using the eclipse IDE which was hell to configure by adding Android plugins,my girlfriend had a birthday.
With my new found love of coding thought of developing a b-day app for her.With so little android knowledge I had a great idea the main activity would have her photo as the background and button which when clicked would show a toast saying happy b-day love.
After spending few minutes in Tutorial point and learning how to display a toast and setting click listeners on buttons I was good to go and compiled the app.

Later that evening I head to her room where her b-day was to be held with some of her lady friends .When presenting gifts I presented her gift said had one more surprise for her and asked for her phone and using bluetooth sent the apk to her phone.
Installing the app I was scared to death on seeing how my grey buttons were displaying on her 2.7 screen size since had no idea on designing for multiple screens.
Giving her back the phone she loved the app and felt like her superman in the room though not for long.Her lady friends had gone ahead took her phone and were critising the app:
Why can't I take a selfie
Why can't the app play a b-day song for her and this went on them not knowing how hurting that was.
Bumped on the lady who lead the onslaught on me and had to go down memory lane.Life is a journey.

I think, after a few weeks, I'm actually quite enjoying that the Android SDK is genuinely awful.

We all know the feeling: "This is shit, whoever designed this is a fuc...oh, I get it. This is pretty cool actually."

So, it's nice to encounter a genuine dumpster fire of a platform.

I think the beautiful thing about its absolute obsession with providing a context to every single operation, is that you end up passing it around so much that the very concept of context becomes redundant.

Honestly, half of the stuff in here I've just attached to a global statics class, because it saves having to request a context, or a manager or some fucking kind of adapter, and it works just fine.

I've started to laugh when I look up a solution and see the browser scrollbar shrink into infinity, because the recommended answer is about two whole pages' worth of boilerplate to make the back button disappear or something.

I don't think there's been a single moment where I've just been in the flow of writing code. Pretty much all of the process is grafting boilerplate into it.

Not long til deadline, thank fuck.

I wish there was a back button on a debugger...... Ultimate bliss.

Countless hours saved.

*Me testing my api with vue.js*

Me: can you please update salesforce content and add new image.

Coworker: Done,image updated:

Me: did you click the sync button? Image seems to be not loading.

Co-worker: why don't you clear your browsing history and clear your cache.

Me: (talking to myself: you are asking me to clear my cache? ME? ME? ME?) Smiles back to coworker.

Co-worker: Did it work?

Me: Nope! Seems to it that you have not sync the content on salesforce. Please hit the sync button.

Co-worker: I did!

Me: I ask co-worker B he said content is not sync.

True story, honest to god.
Developed a state or the art SOA web app. Front end communicates with backend through API.
Client meeting, this guy looks me right in the eyes and blurts out : « why does the submit button get disabled after first click ? Clicking it a few times gets my request high priority »
I folded back my laptop and left the meeting without saying a word. Pretty sure I’m getting fired tomorrow.

relative: can you help me with my website?
me: ok, what do you need?
them: okay, i have this wordpress homepage that someone made for me and actually, when you go to my image gallery, i only want a simple "back" button that leads to the main page. but i cannot add it via wordpress functionality.
me: okay, i'll make you this button in under 10 minutes, given it doesn't require any fancy design. but i have no experience with messing with wordpress so far... let me check what their templates look like
(after 1 hour): wtf is this mess 😭

...since they only had their production website, i didn't dare to change anything and told them they best hire that dev again 🙈

!dev

Whoever the fuck wit coded the entire system for the university/college application information portal over here in my country needs to be hung, shot, hung again and shot.

It's **ABSOLUTE FUCKING GARBAGE** on the design. First we have the search box. It literally takes a good 20 seconds to query 1000 entries at low traffic and 3 MINUTES at high traffic. Bad enough? Because it would also take that long to give you a table of search result which is, I shit you not, identical to the drop-down results you get while typing except rendered inside a <table></table> with some overlay!

Oh, did I mention it didn't have partial match? Yea, IT DIDN'T. For example, "John Hurr Doe City" would not match "John Hurr Doe city" just to piss you off. And then we have the fuckers that do this:
- University A John Hurr Doe city
- University B JHD City
- University C JHD city
That and no partial match. Yea. It's BS.

Also. if you wanna search again after view a school, you have to press "Back", the physical "Back" of the browser. Fair, it's good, but if you press anything other than that button, welll, you're fucked although lightly.

The cherry on top of the rant cone? The whole thing is made by the studentfucking Ministry of Education and Training, the mother of overlord of students. Yea. The fucking Ministry itself. Really. You wanna go "catch up with the world and master the 4.0 Industrial Revolution" and yet you can't fucking code the site properly. Fuck you, fuck you, fuck your horse you're riding and probably fuck you as well.

Sorry for getting slightly political at the end, the damn page is getting on my nerve.

So, it's time to fucking rant!

Location: A small startup where direct contact with C-Level members is frequent.

A while back we had a customer using our SaaS product who had gripes about the way it worked.

He contacted our CEO and made a bunch of claims based on bad assumptions.

In the end, he wanted all images removed from his site. I was pulled aside by the CEO and asked if I could handle this for him and make a new screen for them without images.

So I did. I tried to discuss and get deeper into the problem by saying "this seems like a symptom of a problem and not the actual problem. What do you think?" He responded with "That was his request so it must be the problem if it won't take long then let's fix it for him.

- a week later

The problem is fixed and in the wild. No more images. Now he has another request :/

He does not like the pagination on his site. He says " I shouldn't have to click a button when I scroll so I want the be able to scroll and see all my products!"

This time the CEO asks me if this can easily be done and I take him aside and say "no, this will be a big change to our system and will need to be discussed with the team."

The main point I make is that we should go down and spend some time with this customer to find out what the real problem is.

After a half hour of discussion about the real issue he decided to bring in the CTO.

In the end, we implemented infinite scroll, dropping our current product building tasks to service one customer (yeah, it's a bad scene). But we got infinite scroll built and shipped.

- 2 Weeks later

This time he demands that infinite scroll isn't good enough. "If I scroll fast then I have to wait for them to load, they should all load at once!"

This time I have had enough. I can see the CEO is coming over to me to as me how much work is in this. I tell him there are 3 things I have to say...

1. I'm going to implement exactly what he asked by the end of the day.
2. We will only release it to him because it is going to be a shit-show loading everything at once, the load times will be mental!
3. We should fire this customer, right now.

So, I built it. Customer hated it (of course, who the fuck wants to wait 30s for loading. That's basically a lifetime). We changed it back and he was still mad.

- 2 weeks later

Customer leaves. Good riddance.

- sometime later

I am in the customer's store on a road trip. I get a feel for how their store works and they have a different system for making things operate.

It turns out that they did not know what the real problem was. They actually needed a completely different system (from a UX perspective) for accessing their data.

To top it all off, the system would have taken less time to build than the shitty fixes we made over weeks of work. FFS

I guess the moral of the rant is to find the problem, not a symptom of the problem.

Boi did I forget what a horror is to deal with Wndows...

I just wanted to shutdown a laptop to replace the SSD and a wifi card. Prepared everything, clicked on the [start] and there were only "Update and *" options. Wha the hell I thought, I could spare a few minutes. It's just a software update - should not take long!

Little did I know...
That was 45 minutes ago and It's still shutting down. And I'm just sitting with that screwdrived in my hand, looking at that blue screen and waiting. I feel stupid

UPDATE: I gave up. Long-pressed the POWER button. que sera, sera, right?

Lights go out. I press POWER again to boot it back up (forgot to save smth else). And it boots up back to the "SHUTTING fucking DOWN" AGAIN!!!

I feel like resigning from a company that i joined 3 weeks back.

I don't like to code in PHP and the manager wants to stick on to that , no new developers joining the company and php is one of the reason. The code is a mess. Every now and then some other team come running for a change like one button to do some shit and then for a fix after 15mins of release.

So many database operations are happening manually. No innovation in the team. Developers are very boring , women being senior developers and team leads brings stability but there is no innovation , excitement or any enthusiasm. All my team members are very happy doing mediocre shit. Manager talks about agile development and they are following that at a level where every half a day some requirement changes.

I m tired of being a developer that fixes the same mediocre shit.

Its too boring.

Twitter has become just like Facebook now, where if you click on something interesting and then press the back button everything will be fucking gone. this shit is horrendous and not how webbrowsers work. I don't know what apeshit thought of this but it needs to stop. The back button takes me back to where I was. not to new content.

So this just happened,

Me and my co-worker (we are junior developers) were working on the same bug, it was a post call throwing a server exception.

We had asked for help to debug this issue from a senior developer the day before, he was quite busy with his own tasks.

He is one those kinds who would keep working even if the entire bay is wasting their time, always keeping to himself, needless to say I haven't seen him smile.

Back to my story, he couldn't spare time yesterday so we tried to squash the bug ourselves thinking he might have forgotten we had called him.He then comes out of nowhere, he firsr checks the button bindings, params sent and the call being made.

He then went through the backend code strategically placing the break points, clicks and debugs a few times and then opens the console. BAM!!!!

" D' hell yo !!" Shows up in the console, not just once but multiple times. Turns out I forgot the logger I had placed in the catch block.

He turns to me in super slo-mo looks me in the eye and whispers "what the hell yo!" and kept quite for some time, meanwhile the sense of cringe was slowly creeping on me. That was when he let out a loud blurt and the entire cabin turned to us. Needless to say it was awkward.

His smile was creepy though :/

I only created a fucking class, a FUCKING EMPTY CLASS

Cancel button does nothing, obviously.
After 30 seconds or so, everything is back to normal. This shit reminds me of the "good old days" with Eclipse.
I hated Eclipse back then, and I fucking hate VS now

This is why I hate Windows:

For about a month now, I've been learning/working on salesforce, so my Macbook was enough for me.
Today there was a bug in something I built in iur Python backend, and since it has a dependency on windows, I booted the old guy up.

And this is what I see. For about 1.5 hours this went on.

Then it started, but system consuming 100% disk and 80+% CPU. Can't do a thing.

And when zoom finally opened (for a quick meet), the camera turned on halfway down the meeting, and then the system restarted on it's own.

Old man showing that same screen again for more than 30 minutes.

Since I have dual boot on this one, I hard-shutdown it using power button, and now boot into ubuntu 20. This works so beautifully (although it froze for about 5 seconds before popping up the updates panel, something I CHOSE to keep enabled). I try going back to Windows, and it's hell again.

Here I am now trying to set up a ec2 instance and setup the app source there so that I can debug with RDP.

And yeah, Component Object Model is a motherfucking bitch. Person who invented it should die. People who build apps leveraging this should die. Business leaders who say "Hey this app (built with COM) can solve the problem easily, so use this" should die choking on their own phallus. And developers like me who keep using this because "the last guy did this" should die too.

Microsoft and it's products are the death of sane people.

Fucking Gates. Its the same damn hardware.

My phone fell down for the thousandth time and i thought it was okay as it usually has been in previous attempts at suicide.

Pressed power button ...
Screen turned on showing lock screen...
Touched back key .... phone vibrated....
Hmmm... It's okay. Didn't try unlocking screen...

Received a call later on....
Swiped to pick up call.... Nothing moved...
Turned the screen off. Turned it on again. Tried opening screen lock. Again nothing moved...

Got an OTG and plugged a mouse into phone.
Cursor moves.

Alas... My Phone's Touch Unit is DEAD :/

This is what happened today in our dayli:

Lead: We need to profile our software

Me: You can use the chrome devtools as remote profiler, even on prod, or make HAR files for later inspection.

Lead: Yeah but no that’s just collecting data on every tick, we need something like “has been called x times”

Me: Yeah but you can filt -

Lead: Yeah no, so back when I wrote code in Delphi...

Me: *oh god no not this again*

Lead: ... We could have clicked a button in our IDE and it would wrap the function call with the API call to profile that function ...

Me, to the secret dev group in slack: doesn’t a simple method decorator and node performance api help with that?

The people in the group: We had this topic last Friday all day...

Me: oh well *get’s coffee and ignores lead*

God damnit Quora!

I stumbled upon some article or post or whatever they are called on quora.
And I really wanted to read the comments on it. It wouldn’t let me unless I log in.

I normally don’t do that but I thought I’ll make an exception because I really wanted to read the comments.

So I clicked on that comments button and logged in (via google). First it presented me some modal dialog to pick 5 things that interest me. And it was mandatory. Fine… I picked those 5 things.

Finally it presents me the list of articles or whatever. But not the same list that I have seen before I was logged in. Scrolling, the article of my interest is not there. God damnit! Just show me my comments for fucks sake.

I go back to that tab where I was not logged in to somehow copy the link of that article or the link to the comments section. But it doesn’t let me. Some bullshit pseudo smart layer of crap is preventing me from doing anything.

Then I abuse the fucking share link to visit it in my logged in tab to finally see the comments that I came for.

And the comments weren’t even worth it. God! What a waste of time! And how can one fuck up a fucking forum so much?

It will be a lesson for me not to visit Quora ever again.

I heard good things about Edge recently and thought that I should give it a try for a few days.

I’ve opened the same pdf file in multiple Edge windows and and tabs, each scrolled to a different page.

#1
The middle-mouse button scrolling is broken on half of the windows and tabs. You press the button, you see the scroll mouse curser. But it doesn’t scroll.

#2
Scrolling horizontally to an area which wasn’t visible before, the content there is extremely blurry. Scrolling vertically to different pages doesn’t fix it. Is it the pdf? No. It’s just Edge. Zoom in and out again and the blurriness is fixed for now. Until it comes back later on a random page.

#3
Duplicate another tab and suddenly it crashes all of the tabs and windows of Edge. Now I need to open them all again and scroll to the positions that they were before…

If you think that it was just a one time issue, you are wrong. All of them happened multiple times and after Windows reboots.

I’m back to Firefox again.

Not as much of a rant as a share of my exasperation you might breathe a bit more heavily out your nose at.

My work has dealt out new laptops to devs. Such shiny, very wow. They're also famously easy to use.
.
.
.
My arse.
.
.
.
I got the laptop, transferred the necessary files and settings over, then got to work. Delivered ticket i, delivered ticket j, delivered the tests (tests first *cough*) then delivered Mr Bullet to Mr Foot.

Day 4 of using the temporary passwords support gave me I thought it was time to get with department policy and change my myriad passwords to a single one. Maybe it's not as secure but oh hell, would having a single sign-on have saved me from this.

I went for my new machine's password first because why not? It's the one I'll use the most, and I definitely won't forget it. I didn't. (I didn't.) I plopped in my memorable password, including special characters, caps, and numbers, again (carefully typed) in the second password field, then nearly confirmed. Curiosity, you bastard.

There's a key icon by the password field and I still had milk teeth left to chew any and all new features with.
Naturally I click on it. I'm greeted by a window showing me a password generating tool. So many features, options for choosing length, character types, and tons of others but thinking back on it, I only remember those two. I had a cheeky peek at the different passwords generated by it, including playing with the length slider. My curiosity sated, I closed that window and confirmed that my password was in.

You probably know where this is going. I say probably to give room for those of you like me who certifiably. did. not.

Time to test my new password.
*Smacks the power button to log off*
Time to put it in (ooer)
*Smacks in the password*
I N C O R R E C T L O G I N D E T A I L S.

Whoops, typo probably.
Do it again.
I N C O R R E C T L O G I N D E T A I L S.

No u.
Try again.
I N C O R R E C T L O G I N D E T A I L S.

Try my previous password.
Well, SUCCESS... but actually, no.

Tried the previous previous password.
T O O M A N Y A T T E M P T S

Ahh fuck, I can't believe I've done this, but going to support is for pussies. I'll put this by the rest of the fire, I can work on my old laptop.

Day starts getting late, gotta go swimming soonish. Should probably solve the problem. Cue a whole 40 minutes trying my 15 or so different passwords and their permutations because oh heck I hope it's one of them.
I talk to a colleague because by now the "days since last incident" counter has been reset.

"Hello there Ryan, would you kindly go on a voyage with me that I may retrace my steps and perhaps discover the source of this mystery?"

"A man chooses, a slave obeys. I choose... lmao ye sure m8, but I'm driving"

We went straight for the password generator, then the length slider, because who doesn't love sliding a slidey boi. Soon as we moved it my upside down frown turned back around. Down in the 'new password' and the 'confirm new password' IT WAS FUCKING AUTOCOMPLETING. The slidey boi was changing the number of asterisks in both bars as we moved it. Mystery solved, password generator arrested, shit's still fucked.

Bite the bullet, call support.
"Hi, I need my password resetting. I dun goofed"
*details tech support needs*
*It can be sorted but the tech is ages away*
Gotta be punctual for swimming, got two whole lengths to do and a sauna to sit in.
"I'm off soon, can it happen tomorrow?"
"Yeah no problem someone will be down in the morning."

Next day. Friday. 3 hours later, still no contact. Go to support room myself.
The guy really tries, goes through everything he can, gets informed that he needs a code from Derek. Where's Derek? Ah shet. He's on holiday.

There goes my weekend (looong weekend, bank holiday plus day flexi-time) where I could have shown off to my girlfriend the quality at which this laptop can play all our favourite animé, and probably get remind by her that my personal laptop has an i2350u with integrated graphics.

TODAY. (Part is unrelated, but still, ugh.)
Go to work. Ten minutes away realise I forgot my door pass.
Bollocks.
Go get a temporary pass (of shame).
Go to clock in. My fob was with my REAL pass.
What the wank.
Get to my desk, nobody notices my shame. I'm thirsty. I'll have the bottle from my drawer. But wait, what's this? No key that usually lives with my pass? Can't even unlock it?
No thanks.

Support might be able to cheer me up. Support is now for manly men too.
*Knock knock*
"Me again"
"Yeah give it here, I've got the code"
He fixes it, I reset my pass, sensibly change my other passwords.
Or I would, if the internet would work.

It connects, but no traffic? Ryan from earlier helps, we solve it after a while.

My passwords are now sorted, machine is okay, crisis resolved.

*THE END*

If you skipped the whole thing and were expecting a tl;dr, you just lost the game.

Otherwise, I absolve you of having lost the game.

Exactly at the char limit

this just happened a few seconds ago and I am just laughing at the pathetic site that is Facebook. xD
4 years ago:
So I was quite a noobie gamer/hacker(sort of) back then and i had a habit of having multiple gmail/fb accounts, just for gaming, like accounts through which i can log in all at once in the same poker room, so 4/5 players in the game are me, or just some multiple accounts for clash of clans for donations.
I had 7-8 accounts back then. one had a name that translated to "may the dead remain in peace "@yahoomail.com . it was linked to fb using same initials. after sometime only this and 2 of my main accs were all i cared about.even today when i feel like playing, i sometimes use those accs.

2 years ago.
My dad is a simple man and was quite naive to modern techs and used to hang around with physical button nokia phones.But we had a business change, my father was now in a partnership in a restaurant where his daily work included a lot of sitting job and and casual working. So he bought a smartphone for some time pass.
He now wanted to download apps and me to teach him.I tried a lot to get him his own acc, but he couldn't remember his login credentials.
so at the end i added one of my own fake ID's(maythedead...) so he could install from playstore, watch vids on youtube and whatever.

The Actual Adventure starts now
Today, 1 hour ago:
I had completely forgot about this incident, since my parents are now quite modern in terms of tech.
But today out of nowhere i recieved an email that someone has JUST CHAINGED MY FB PASSWORD FOR ONE OF MY FAKE ACCS!?!??
what the hell, i know it was just a useless acc and i never even check my fb from any acc these days, but if someone could login into that acc, its not very difficult to track my main accs, id's, etc so i immediately opened this fb security portal and that's where the stupidity starts:

1)To recover your account they FUCKIN ASKS FOR A PHYSICAL ID. yeah, no email, no security question you have to scan your driving license or passport to get back to your account.And where would I get a license for some person named "may the dead remain in peace"? i simply went back.
2) tried another hack that i thought that will work.Closed fb help page, opened fb again , tried to login with my old credentials, it says" old password has been changed,please enter new password", i click forget password and they send an otp. i thought yes i won, because the number and recover mail id was mine only so i received it.
when i added the otp, i was first sent to a password change page (woohoo, i really won! :)) but then it sends me again to the same fuckin physical id verification page.FFFFFFFFFuck

3)I was sad and terrified that i got hacked.But 10 mins later a mail comes ,"Your Facebook password was reset using the email address on Tuesday, April 10, 2018 at 8:24pm (UTC+05:30)."
I tried clicking the links attached, hoping that the password i changed(point<2>) has actually done something to account.NADA, the account still needs a physical license to open:/

4) lost, i just login to my main account and lookup for my lost fake account. the fun part:my account has the display pic of my father?!!?!
So apparently, my father wanted to try facebook, he used the fake account i gave him to create one, fb showed him that this id already has an fb account attached to it and he accidently changed my password.MY FATHER WAS THE HACKER THE WHOLE TIME xD.
but response from fb?" well sir, if you want your virtually shitty account back , you first will have to provide us with all details of your bank transactions or your voter id card, maybe trump will like it"

My company called the icon for the button to go back "preview" because they don't know the english for this word is previous

Edit: also they didn't know you can just rotate an image instead of making a rotated copy of it

Fuck Homestead.

For the fortune of you not to know, Homestead is a sad attempt at a Wix-like build your own website platform.

However, Homestead is the most unusable piece of shit platform that humans have ever had the misery of interacting with

Lets start off with the login page. The login page is small, unresponsive and half the time just deletes your input whenever you press submit.

It's important to note that unless you're running MacOS or Windows, Homestead will send to an error page on which there's a link to contact support, but pressing that link requires MacOS or Windows.

Fine, I'll fiddle around with my user-agent, and we'll be in soon enough. But now we come to the joy that is the website editor itself.

The website editor is clunky, hard to use, and has enough menus and submenus and sidebars to make the Jira UI shake with fear. Each interface option label is either ridiculously ambiguous or just straight up wrong. The built-in HTML editor doesn't support HTML5, in the name of "browser compatibility".

CSS? Pah! Who needs it! Our psuedo-90s skeuomorphic ugly-as-shit prebuilt styles will work just fine. Responsive design? Bullshit! Nobody uses a smartphone to browse the web, so why do we need to handle it?

Uploading a file? Good fucking luck buddy. There's a complicated dance among the minefield of pop-ups that ask you to confirm some shit or modify some shit and you gotta click the right option each time or else the file won't upload.

Wanna use https like 86% of the entire web and all modern websites? That's a premium feature. Fork over an extra $10 a month

Ok ok, I made it through all that. Dig through the thousands of menus to find the 'publish changes' button, and sigh with relief.

Open up a private browser tab to check my work, and nope. The site looks like shit, even by Homestead's standards. That's because Homestead claims to be a WYSIWYG editor, but it's a damn lie. The site looks like shit, so it's time do dive back into the hellhole that is this damn site editor.

And rinse and repeat. Deal with the shitty editor, publish, and pray it doesn't look like garbage. Be too scared to test on other devices because this flaming pile of dog shit pretending to be a website is bad enough on my device.

Two more months, then I'm done with this client. Someone get me a drink

Designer makes an app Mockup using an iOS template. I make the android version and the ios dev makes his version.

Upon completion, the client rejects mine saying that I forgot to put back buttons in the top left corner of each screen.

My face when he didn't reject the ios version for not having a hardware back button. 🤦‍♂️

Is there a way to disable the social media buttons and if not could that be built in?

I keep pressing the buttons by accident when I move my finger to the back button. And I cannot even use them because I dont have an account at those platforms.

Few years ago as a junior android dev with couple years of self taught experience of working in startups I submitted a simple android app assignment for a junior android dev role. Assignment had only like 8 requirements so I followed them to the letter. That didn't end well.

App was simple just 3 screens. Login screen with username and password input fields, login button.

Had to call a login endpoint after login button was clicked, redirecting to home screen, calling items endpoint, displaying a list of items and when an item was clicked passing item data and redirect to item details screen.

Needless to say big swinging dick senior was not impressed. UI was not perfect, I forgot to display a loading animation when fetching data, didnt handle back button properly.

I agreed with some points but other comments were clearly just nitpicking: his preferred variable naming conventions, his opinions on architecture that was not up to his standard (official google arch at the time was not up to his standard).

He also was mad that app wasn't prepared for release to googleplay (another out of the ass requirement). Like I would prepare a 3 screen app for prod release that he will forget ever existed after 20min of his review.

Lots more of nitpicking, encapsulation this encapsulation that, omg now hes shocked that there are a few warnings after the project is built.

Regardless my self confidence was destroyed at that point and after few more negative experiences I dropped android dev alltogether for a couple years and switched to game dev.

After game dev ran its course I went back to android dev and found a supportive place where I could grow.

Looking back, they were actually hiring atleast a mid level for a junior position but I was grilled as a senior. The guy literally didnt wrote any single positive thing in that review about my code even tho my senior peers said my project was decent back then, its just that I didnt handle a few edge cases and that's all.

I looked up the guy in linkedin, turns out hes a uni dropout who posts all books that he red about software dev in his education section of his linkedin profile. Found a bunch of other narcissistic stuff on his profile. Guy was a fucking idiot. Even if I worked under him it would have probably sucked.

Learned some important lessons I guess. Always get a second, 3rd and 4th opinion and dont take criticism too seriously. Always check what kind of person is providing feedback.

My pm requested me to estimate few tasks on a new project(single page app), the problem was that he was creator of these tasks, so we ended up with

- Create back button
- Create next button
- Create table with contents
... etc

As I prefer to take things literally I estimated each task as they literally should (5 min for adding buttons etc). So all tasks together were estimated for about 5h, while whole project was estimated for 100MD. After few talks and discussions we ended up with:

- Create back button
- Create back button logic
- Create next button
- Create next button logic
etc

I have a new UNTRAINED bot on my site. It's based on openai now. And that's why it's blazing fast and blazing usless.

I can tell you why bots are so boring and will sure cause the dead internet theory. My datasets for example never contain real disturbing stuff ACCORDING TO NORMAL PEOPLE. EVERY TIME:

"The job failed due to an invalid training file. This training file was blocked by our moderation system because it contains too many examples that violate OpenAI's usage policies, or because it attempts to create model outputs that violate OpenAI's usage policies."

Now i'm really done. I gonna email them about their unusable training system.

In theory, i could test the message one by one if it is bad first. Don't want to do or pay for that. There should be an option to skip the data it considers disturbing instead of cancelling a whole data set for 0.1%. You also don't want to know how long it takes BEFORE he is finished validating you set. I think someone is doing it manually and clicks 'Uh uh..'-button..

Also, for the people who think they have gpt4o by having the API, you're lied to. The 'own gpt'-option on the paid openai is way more advanced than the ones you make locally.

They don't give us the real good stuff!

Oh, btw! The input data for my training is based on FORMER conversations with the bot. I automated a script to repeat a conversation I had and selected those messages and clicked 'train'. So it even complained about its OWN data! That data was already saying stuff like 'I can't help you with that' IN my training data. So, you 'corrected' and corrupted my data and now its still nog good enough for round 2?

I would really love to go back to local LLM's, but I can't imagine having ever a machine that generates as fast as the real GPT does. I also prefer to do it myself, but it's David vs. Goliath, even with a 5k computer. I'm sure.

Low quality rant, I know. I'm typing while still frustrated. For people who think censorship is needed often, this is the result! According to someone else, YOU are the one who has to be censored. Don't forget that.

Decided to go back to windows for a bit after not using it for about 6 months (on physical hardware) and literally forgot there was a start menu, minimise button, taskbar and that the window controls are on the right...

I have done the impossible and almost forgotten how to use windows, not sure if this is a good or bad sign

> Click on a rant. Read, interact, enjoy.

> Click "back" button.

> Feed reloads. Back to the top.

Fuck this shit. Every fucking time!

Ever get assigned a defect like this?

First click any radio button and hit the Next button. Then on the next screen click some buttons and hit back button. Then hit next, change a radio selection, hit back, then next, then back, then next and eventually page will bomb out.

Wtf am I supposed to do with this?!

So, I work in a game development studio, right?
We're trying to launch the title on as many platforms as reasonable, because as a social VR app we're kinda rowing upstream.
So far, Steam and Oculus have been fairly reasonable, if oddly broken and inconsistent.
Enter store 3.
Basically no in-game transaction support (our asking prompted them to *start* developing it. No, it's not very complete). No patch-update system (You want an update? Gotta download the whole fsckin' thing!). No beta-testing functionality for most of their stuff ("Just write the code like the example, it will work, trust us!"). No tools besides the buggy SDK (Wanna upload that new build? Say hello to this page in your web browser!).
So, in other words: Fun.

We've been trying to get actively launched for two months now. Keep in mind that the build has been up on Steam and Oculus for over a year and half a year (respectively), so the actual binary functionality is, presumably fine.

The best feedback we get back tends to be "Well, when we click the Launch button it crashes, so fail."
Meanwhile we're going back and forth, dealing with other-side-of-the-world timezone lag, trying to figure out what is so different from their machines as ours. Eventually we get them to start sending logs (and no, Windows Event logs are not sufficient for GAMES, where did you even get that idea????) except the logs indicate that the program is getting killed so terribly that the engine's built-in crash handler can't even kick in to generate memory dumps or even know it died.

All this boils down to today, where I get a screenshot of their latest attempt.

I just can't even right now.

! random story

Today i was cleaning my laptop and on right side of it i suddenly touched a button... !!!

!!!!SURPRISE !!!!

DVD player popped out.. and it's dusty as hell.. I was like what ?? How long this has been in laptop.. It's weird.. I never used it.. Why the heck we need it.. I didn't saw anybody holding dvd disc nowadays .. Man nobody uses those shit's anymore.. we have pen drives and External HDD's now. Why the heck manufacture's still keep these dvd player in Laptop's..

But it brought my childhood memories back though.. !!

It’s been so long since I posted but this time it’s juicy again.

I got a coworker, no prio experience but already a year and few months into the job. He’s bad.
Magnitudes of bad!

We’re trying to teach him but to no avail. Everything about him sucks, major ballsack to be exact.

His attitude is to avoid every task, finishes nothing and then starts something new.

„Did you do X like we told you to?“
„No I started on Y, because I thought it [looks better, seems more interesting, thought that X is useless…]“

When you ask him much is done he is always „almost“ finished and needs your help on the „last 5-10%“. Yeah fuck that!

But that guy has a talent, his talent is to always give you technically correct answers which actually are complete bullshit.

„What are you doing at your job?“
„Staring at a screen and typing things.“ dude what?

That guy used the excuse „I can’t do maths“ on everything.

For an exam he had to calculate how long it would take to reach a certain amount if you would get some interest in that every year.
He asked the teacher for the formula. During the exam! And when the teacher didn’t want to give it to him he wrote plainly „can’t do maths“ on the paper and left

His code is of a quality as if he would write his first line in a week and then has the audacity to blame me and the colleagues for not explaining it right.

Ok you might think now we’re teaching him bad, or are too impatient. But honestly if you have to explain how to do a for loop for over about 15 months and get that attitude I think you get the right to be angry. I don’t mind explaining on how things work, even for the hundredth time, but then don’t tell me you understood, go behind my back, complain at a colleague how bad I explained, get explained by him and then do it again until you whored yourself through the whole staff!

It’s like he got the mind swiper from Men in black at home. Every day he hits the reset button.

He had a week of just changing indentation on a html file. Why? Because he wanted to find his style.

Yeah his style

if(a==b){
console.log(a);
}
else {
console.log(b)
}

And to produce code like that it takes him atleast 4 hours of trial and error.

And at the same time he goes arround and boasts what a super good programmer he his and that he can do some project work for them.
How we found out? Because he started working in those projects during work time at the office and asked us how to do things.
And he does so like a complete bastard!
Broken sql query? “No that query is perfect as it is, it’s supposed to show no results! But, just in theory, if I wanted to show some results, what would I need to change?”

I’m so mad about it and pissed on a personal level because he goes around blames everyone and the world for his short comings

I am currently looking for a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation), because my music projects are starting to get a little too complex for Audacity.

So I started looking for a good, easy-to-learn, ideally free program, and quickly learned that Avid now has a free version of Pro Tools called First.

So I go to their site and fill out the registration form to get the download. In addition to creating an account with Avid, you also need to create one with iLok, which apparently has something to do with how they manage their licenses. Kinda overkill for a free program, but okay...

I download the program (about 3gigs...), install it and try to start it. It gives me an error message about missing some service. Okay? I'm confused because I notice that an 'Application Manager' service has appeared in my tray, and when I open that I can log into my new account just fine. But it still doesn't work.

There's a link in the error message to the iLok website, and it looks like ai need to dowload and install another component. Why didn't that get installed with the program if it's required?

Hmm...

So I go to the iLok site, download it and install it. Pro Tools First still won't start. I realize that the PTF installer asked me to reboot, which I didn't do because: a) I always have a lot of windows open, and b) How often is a reboot ACTUALLY required? Why would you need to reboot?

So I (begrudgingly) reboot, and now the program seems to start initializing... but then it throws an error message about some plugin that it can't load because it doesn't work for the 64 bit version. Then... why are you even looking for it?
And then it says something like: 'I can't handle that, I'm just gonna shut down'.

What?

I try starting it again. Same error appears, but then it gets past it this time... Only to throw another error message about something else it can't load, and therefore it must shut down.

Deep breath.

Third time is the charm, the program actually made it to the project create/load screen! Huzzah!
So I look around a bit, but don't do much. It doesn't seem too intuitive to me, so I start watching some tutorials on YouTube from Avid themselves. It's a little late by now, so I don't get my hands dirty that day.

Next time I want to try out the program I start it up, still get error messages, but it does seem to initialize okay. But then the 'Create project' button doesn't react when I press it.

It turns out that the program takes a looong time to log in to the avid account, even though the manager service is running and logged in...

When it finally logs on I create a new blank project, but it doesn't ask me where to save it to. I see there is a counter saying 1/3 and looking around I find some info about 'cloud based projects'.

It would seem that this program only supports saving projects to the cloud, and you get only 3 projects total. Three. THREE?

Ahem...

I add an instrument track to my new project and select the one and only plugin, which is a synth. I don't see the plugin window, like in the tutorials I watched. I fiddle around with the windows, but I only manage to get the layout fucked up. There's a handy 'Window' menu, but none of the options resets the view. The main window is now sporting a WINDOWS FUCKING 7 BORDER! And partially blocking the view of the top menu.

Blaaargh!

Frustrated, I shut the program down and restart it. I now select one of the project templates (after waiting for it to LOG IN AGAIN!) in the hope that I might have a bit more luck with that starting point.

But when the template has loaded, out of nowhere, the program goes from maximized to windowed mode! And the fucking Win7 border is back again, still messing with the main menu!

FFS!

I get the sucker maximized again and select one of the synth tracks, and Lo and Behold! The synth plugin window actually shows up! But of course there is no sound produced when I play, neither with the keyboard or my midi keyboard.

Oh no, that would have been too easy.

I see some the meters moving when I play, but no sound is produced. I check the options menu, but find out nothing useful except for the fact that the program only support 48kHz sample rate. That's pretty disappointing when you have a 192kHz/24bit soundcard.

I'm done. This piece of shit software is NOT for me. It's bloated, complicated to sign up for and install, extremely limited and buggy as hell!

The final insult is that it takes 5 minutes to uninstall because there is no uninstall option in the so-called 'Application Manager' (of course fucking not!), and doing it through Programs & Features there are 5 (FIVE!!) different apps and services to uninstall, one by one.

0/10, would not recommend.

!(!(!(!(!(!(!(!rant)))))))
My new HTC smartphone hates me.
First it started to shut down all of the sudden yesterday night, when I was solving quadratic equations on my laptop.
I thought that it might be due to low battery. So I have restarted it. After putting itself into a bootloop for 4 start sequences, it was able to fully start to the page where it told me to enter the security pin to decrypt my files. I also had 30 attempts left. Like a ransomware.

I was like "tf I didn't set anything up".
So I decided to use my first attempt as I had 30 attempts left.
I entered the pin (I can swear that it's correct) and it told me that it has to wipe the /data partition.

I did that. I pressed that button. After waiting for 30 minutes I gave up and rebooted into the bootloader.
Bootloader -> Download Mode -> wipe /data (stock rom + stock recovery btw.)

Some error with "e: mount /cache failed[...]e: mount /data failed"
So, I tried using the adb sideload - no success.
Fastbooted into RUU Mode - HTC keeps rebooting itself into the RUU Mode - no success

Tried to flash the firmware and twrp recovery from Download mode - no success
Then I tried to flash all these things from the sd card - no success

Searched for revolutionary (I know this from my old HTC sensation device).
It wasn't big of any help.

Then someone on xda recommended htcDev (htc's <b>developer-friendly</b> lol site)
I followed every step. Everything seemed to be okay.
I got to the last step.
I needed to get my encrypted token by entering "fastboot oem get_identifier_token" to be able to submit it to HTC, and after they would send me an e-Mail with an .bin file that would let me unlock the bootloader to be able to flash my way through all this headache giving fucking piece of dog shit!

But since I can't back to the phone settings to select the bootloader activation box that would let me get my token... but nah.

FML

------------
Sent by using the devRant web app (:\)

F*CKING MICROSFT CAN'T EVEN FIGURE OUT HOW TO USE THEIR OWN SH*T

I just wanted to install a sh*tty app from sh*tty microsoft store just to find the f*cking install button not working. Went back to full monkey mode and smashed my mouse against the install button .... now I neither have a f*cking app nore a f*cking mouse.

Thanks Microsoft for f*cking nothing

Fuck me.

I just finished a 5 kyu quiz on codewars, grabbed my mouse to click the "submit final" button and accidentaly hit the button on the side which jumps to the previous page. I lost everything and have to rewrite it now.

Welcome back, ctrl+a ctrl+c obsession, old friend.

GIVE ME MY DOUBLE CLICK TO CLOSE BUTTON BACK!!! NO I DO NOT WANT TO SAVE....

In my previous company we developed a CRM web app for the company to use internally and it was in my humble opinion really easy to make sense of, but for some freaking we kept getting calls whenever someone got an error, and our default response was always to send us an email, then we will get back to you, as it was mostly stupid things they called about, for example, a customer might have to be status terminated, before you can click button A, button A would then be disabled and employees would call asking why. Apparently, people got annoyed by our response and went to the management, to get some guidelines as to when they could call the "development apartment" for help, so the management sends out some guidelines as to when they could call, write or whatever... The following was done without consulting us in any way ANY WAY AT ALL!... Because we all know management knows fucking best, and why bother asking the people that sit with it every day, and the way it was done was by saying:

If the background color on your error is red, it means the error is fatal and you can call the developers immediately, if its orange send an email and they will answer within 48 hours LIKE WTF... Seriously???. That was basically it, and honestly we had just been using colors, without much thought to it ofc red, was an error etc. But they we're not "OMG EVERYTHING IS BREAKING" alert, so we decided to use a couple of hours refactoring the color of the flash errors, and after that, we did not have many red alerts(None, yes none what so ever) We changed all the red ones to orange, and introduced some new colors. That worked for some time around 6 months or so, but then people obviously started calling again like, why even bother... So we created a simple service desk, blocked all incoming calls to our phones that were from regular employees, heard a lot of complaints about this from the employees, management was mad, we had so many meetings with those top paid management fuckers that know everything (way better than you and me), about how to handle this. As it took way too much of our time, that people couldn't bother trying simple things, or make some sense as to why a button is disabled etc. We ended up "winning", was allowed to block calls for some time, till the employees had learned to use a freaking simple service desk, it's not fucking rocket science Okay, stop being a pain in the ass... And it actually fucking worked! Most relaxing time after people got a hang of using the service desk instead of calling life was good after that... <3

HEY GUYS, welcome back to your IDE! Don't forget to update and change your color scheme, and SMASH that run button!

Here's how it usually goes:

1) I estimate the different aspects of the assignment to the best of my abillities, based on customer criteria and information. I come up with an realistic estimate for development and testing.

2) My PM runs the numbers through an algorithm. It adds time for other stuff, but its all still very fair and in tune.

Now to the fucked up part.

3) My ceo and cto looks at the estimate, and he will just turn on every possible button and twist the estimate into what he thinks he can get the customer to pay🤢🤮

This ends in the customer saying - no thank you.
He comes back to us and does not understand why they declined.

Idiot!

!coding

I used to be a sysadmin, which meant I was in charge of quarterly server patching. My team managed about 2500 servers, running various flavors of linux and legacy unix. The vast majority(95% or more) ran Linux(SLES). Our maintenance window was always in the overnight-- 10pm to 6am --so the stroke of 10pm would be a massive cascade of patching commands sent to hundreds of servers.

Before I was brought into the process, it made use of the automation product we were tasked by mgmt to use: Bigfix. It's a real piece of shit. Though we had 2500 or so servers, this environment was dominated by windows. All our vcenter servers ran it, and more importantly, our bigfix nodes were all windows machines. That meant that while we're trying to patch, the bigfix servers would get patched by the windows team. This would cause lots of failed and timed out patching, because the windows admins never quite understood that taking down the automation infrastructure would cause problems.

As such, I got tired of depending on a bunch of button-pushing checkbox-clickers who didn't know shit about shit, so I started writing an ssh-wrapped patching system. By the time I left for my current job, patching had been reduced to a single command to initiate each group's patching and reboots, and an easy check to see when servers come back up. So usually, the way it worked out was that I would send patching orders to 750 machines or so, and within about 5 minutes, they would all be done patching, and within another 20 minutes all the ones that required rebooting but about 5 would be done rebooting.

The "all-nighter" which happened every time was waiting for oracle servers to run timed fscks against a dozen or so large filesystems per server, because they were all on ext3/4, which eats complete shit. Then, several hours later, as they finished, I would have to call the DBAs to tell them to validate their shitty servers.

@dfox add a onBackPressed function and while exit make the code to double press the back button to exit.

Mistakenly clicked back button, now I hate my life.

TURTLEDICK

I need to know WHY THE FUCK one decides that the Esc button should TERMINATE APPLICATION WITHOUT ANY FUCKING WARNING...

Ive been playing Pokémon on a GameBoy Advance Emulator. Ive gotten used to saving every now and then, but out of habit i press Esc and not TAB to go back, and thats when I GET MANHANDLED WITHOUT CONSENT ITS NOT LEGAL FOR FUCK SAKE

Would there EVER be a case where this shit would be good to have?

Since my first post was a success, here's another shameless hack-- in this case, ripping a "closed" database I don't usually have access to and making a copy in MySQL for productivity purposes. That was at a former job as an IT guy at a hardware store, think Lowes/Rona.

We had an old SCO Unix server hosting Informix SQL (curious, anyone here touched iSQL?), which has terminal only forms for the users to handle data, and has keybindings that are strangely vi based (ESC does commit changes. Mindfsck for the users!). To add new price changes to our products, this results to a lengthy procedure inside a terminal form (with ascii borders!) with a few required fields, which makes this rather long. Sadly, only I and a colleague had access to price changes.

Introducing a manager who asks a price change for a brand- not a single product, but the whole product line of a brand we sell. Oh and, those price changes ends later after the weekend (twice the work, back at regular price!)

The usual process is that they send me a price change request Excel document with all the item codes along with the new prices. However, being non technical, those managers write EVERYTHING at hand, cell by cell (code, product name, cost, new price, etc), sometimes just copy pasted from a terminal window

So when the manager asked me to change all those prices, I thought "That's the last time I manually enter all of this sh!t- and so does he". Since I already have a MySQL copy of the items & actual (live) price tables, I wrote a PHP backend to provide a basic API to be consumed to a now VBA enhanced Excel sheet.

This VBA Excel sheet had additional options like calculating a new price based on user provided choices ("Lower price by x $ or x %, but stay above cost by x $ or x %"), so the user could simply write back to back every item codes and the VBA Excel sheet will fetch & display automatically all relevant infos, and calculate a new price if it's a 20% price cut for example.

So when the managers started using that VBA sheet, I had also hidden a button which simply generate all SQL inserts for the prices written in the form, including a "back to regular price" if the user specified an end date, etc.

No more manual form entry for me, no more keyboard pecking for the managers with new prices calculated for them. It was a win/win :)

At the time I had been squatting, arrested, driven 300 miles across country only to be released - mistaken identity with just the clothes on my back. Decided to stay and lined up a couple of interviews. I got offered both but took the one which meant 2 busses and a ferry and 2 hours each way for a data entry position.

They were migrating to a new database and my job was to type it in to a screen so from print outs. Didn’t take long for me to work through that and they were struggling to find stuff for me to do, I mean at one point I was filing paper files. So I saw the 2 it guys doing the same thing with loads of excel files , hours and hours a month just wasted. I wrote a vba excel macro to do it for them at the click of a button and suddenly a position opened up as a junior programmer. Still at the same place 16 years later and were still using software I wrote 15 years ago (.net 1.1) quite happily on win10 surprisingly.

I've tried so many ways for that at night or during walk spark of bug solving ideas:

- fluorescent ink on regular paper
- florescent mini whiteboards
- "alexa remind me.."
- writing down in my phone
- recording on my phone
-..

But all of those due to my short term memory made me forget half the things by the time I opened the fucking phone/app, found where to grab the pen or the whole dance for alexa, to remember the exact phrase I have to spell out, when it should remind me, what time,..

Earlier today I remembered how I had a little tape voice recorder I used to use a ton, thankfully that tech advanced by now and found myself a stereo mic setup little voice recorder that can also act as an mp3 player!

Went for a walk today, while listening to some podcasts, then it hit me as usual on how to fix and implement some things that were awkward at best on paper when I left home, pressed the record button, recorded it and went straight back to music mode, which remembered where I left off!

I'm so indescribably happy, I ordered quite a bunch of the same to just throw around everywhere, at the bed, in the bathroom, kitchen, for walking outside, everywhere haha

Tired of older generation developers teaching people not to use the back button. Make your application not garbage and let the people use the browser as intended for shit sake.

So management wants this:
As soon as a customer reports a bug, management wants to have an "emergency button" to let their inexperienced hands make production fall back to the last stable version, without having to pass through IT and wait for them to fix it. If the server catches a 500 error, this process should be done automatically. All because they don't want to give us more time writing more thorough tests...

So we have a desktop in each meeting room. In case you need to present something. And some of the desktops, if the previous person hasn't gracefully logged off, you can't log on.

Most people would take down the login id, run back to their own desktop, lookup and call the previous person to come and log off.

I'm not one of those nice people as you've already guessed - but there's no reset button on those desktops.

So instead of holding the power botton for a few seconds and tap again, I just unplug the power, and plug it back on.

Got a bug, tap between the menu button and back button to replicate @dfox

Dear Game-Devs,

if your game takes some time to load that's fine but please do NOT let me press a button after starting the game and THEN start loading the menu for some time and instead load the menu immediately! What's the point of that? If I know it takes some time I want to start it and maybe get a coffee and when I come back everything is loaded...

python machine learning tutorials:
- import preprocessed dataset in perfect format specially crafted to match the model instead of reading from file like an actual real life would work
- use images data for recurrent neural network and see no problem
- use Conv1D for 2d input data like images
- use two letter variable names that only tutorial creator knows what they mean.
- do 10 data transformation in 1 line with no explanation of what is going on
- just enter these magic words
- okey guys thanks for watching make sure to hit that subscribe button

ehh, the machine learning ecosystem is burning pile of shit let me give you some examples:

- thanks to years of object oriented programming research and most wonderful abstractions we have "loss.backward()" which have no apparent connection to model but it affects the model, good to know
- cannot install the python packages because python must be >= 3.9 and at the same time < 3.9
- runtime error with bullshit cryptic message
- python having no data types but pytorch forces you to specify float32
- lets throw away the module name of a function with these simple tricks:
"import torch.nn.functional as F"
"import torch_geometric.transforms as T"
- tensor.detach().cpu().numpy() ???
- class NeuralNetwork(torch.nn.Module):
def __init__(self):
super(NeuralNetwork, self).__init__() ????
- lets call a function that switches on the tracking of math operations on tensors "model.train()" instead of something more indicative of the function actual effect like "model.set_mode_to_train()"
- what the fuck is ".iloc" ?
- solving environment -/- brings back memories when you could make a breakfast while the computer was turning on
- hey lets choose the slowest, most sloppy and inconsistent language ever created for high performance computing task called "data sCieNcE". but.. but. you can use numpy! I DONT GIVE A SHIT about numpy why don't you motherfuckers create a language that is inherently performant instead of calling some convoluted c++ library that requires 10s of dependencies? Why don't you create a package management system that works without me having to try random bullshit for 3 hours???
- lets set as industry standard a jupyter notebook which is not git compatible and have either 2 second latency of tab completion, no tab completion, no documentation on hover or useless documentation on hover, no way to easily redo the changes, no autosave, no error highlighting and possibility to use variable defined in a cell below in the cell above it
- lets use inconsistent variable names like "read_csv" and "isfile"
- lets pass a boolean variable as a string "true"
- lets contribute to tech enabled authoritarianism and create a face recognition and object detection models that china uses to destroy uyghur minority
- lets create a license plate computer vision system that will help government surveillance everyone, guys what a great idea

I don't want to deal with this bullshit language, bullshit ecosystem and bullshit unethical tech anymore.

Companies in my country think that since you are a developer, you must be also a product designer. You must know where to put the button, the table etc.
Especially back end developers.

fuck..fuck..FUCK..FUCK YOU MANTIS!!!
fuck you and your fucking invalid security token... fucking cunt...
yeah i love extracting my notes from POST data via the browser dev console cause you fucking delete it when hitting the back button...
THANKS FOR NOTHING

It is incredible how Google got big with good webdesign and now manages to build the shittiest frontends.

It's not enough that YouTube is super slow and breaks every other time I use the "back" button in the browser. When it only forgot my language & theme settings every couple of months that was still too high quality for Google's dogshit standards, so now they made another downgrade: Whenever I set another language it immediately resets it to the language Google thinks I should speak, and at the same time resets the region to where Google thinks I live. Oh, and I have to disable autoplay for every video individually now cause who the fuck uses cookies nowadays right?

Do they also change the language if I travel to another country because those fucks never leave Silicon Valley and can't comprehend that concept?

Google is the Microsoft of web design.

I like how software is smart so I have to do things twice instead of once.

Automatically putting quotes works only if you put quotes and then paste inside it, the problem is I usually paste then put first quote and then need to remove second quote and put it on back and remove second quote from back.

Video start from where you left automatically fires and shows closing credits because you obviously want to see them.

Evaluate variable removes old evaluation because why you want old one when you have new.

Collapsing imports or functions in ide so you need to expand them all the time because who needs to look at functions when we have ai

AI models suggesting and adding meaningless annotations and code suggestions to distract me.

Randomly running some console command because I entered keyboard shortcut I don’t know even exists.

Literally every web browser address bar becomes advertising network instead of showing me history results.

Shadowing browsing history when you click back and forward button.

Search results are now buy results.

Suggesting me useless crap to watch because I watched one video in that topic.

Showing me 10 minutes videos as a solution to my problem where I want to find exact line of text to copy paste it. If I’m lucky I need to write text from video into my computer.

Stack overflow infinite loop of answered in #some-different-question

I think it’s about time for me to slowly retire from programming and software as a whole or switch to notepad because I don’t want to use this crap anymore.

Looks like software is now meant for entertainment and distraction instead of doing actual work where you need precise data and information.

Luckily if everything goes good I can retire soon and throw everything away for a while.

This is actually a question about the devRant app.

I’ve noticed this a few times. When I click a rant repeatedly (say x times), from the front page or from the notifications pane, multiple layers of that rant open up. And I have to hit the back button x amount of times to go back to where I initially was (again, front page or notification pane).

Now, I understand an app capturing multiple user inputs on the same object but shouldn’t it also account for this by only considering those taps as one input, especially if the object is lagging and hadn’t been loaded? Why is devRant implemented this way?

I would consider it undesirable to have Gmail open the same email in multiple layers when you click the same email repeatedly. So, is devRant’s a feature or a bug?

I’m not a web (app) developer. I’d just like some knowledge on how user input might be captured and why repeated inputs aren’t screened out?

If anyone could page the two awesome doods who work on devRant, that would be awesome! I hope I didn’t just wrongly assume their genders.

I decided to upgrade my intellij ultimate from 2019.3 to 2020.2 and I saw there is update button.
I clicked on it.
As I expected it didn’t work and it was 30 minutes waiting looking at progress bar going back and forth couple of times before I decided just to download latest version and drag and drop it to applications folder ( took me 5 minutes) - I use mac so it replaces all crap ( I think ).

I cleared the old cache that growed to 2 gigabytes leaving some configuration files.
Next as always crash on startup cause of incompatible plugins with long java stacktrace - at least I could click the close button or popup closed itself I can’t remember ( one version I remember this button couldn’t be clicked cause it was off the screen and you need to do some cheating to launch ide )
The font has changed and I see that it at least work a little faster - that is nice. Indexing is finally fixed after all those years - probably thanks to visual studio code intellisense pushing those lazy bastards to deal with this.
But the preloader on first logo disappears so I think they decided to remove it cause it’s so fast - no it loads the same time or maybe little longer when I launch it on my old macbook.

After that as always I looked at plugins to see if there’s something interesting, so to find ability to scroll over whole plugins I needed to click couple of times. I think they assume I remember all the nice plugins in their marketplace and I only type search.
Maybe I should be type of user who reads best 2020 plugins for your best ide crap articles filled with advertising or even waste more time to watch all of this great videos about ide ( are there any kind of this stuff ? )

After a few operations I unfortunately clicked apply instead of restart ide and it hanged up on uninstalling some plugin I’m no longer interested in for 5 minutes so I decided to use always working ‘kill -9’ from command line.

Launched again and this time success.
Fortunately indexing finished for this workspace and I can work.

I’m intellij ultimate subscriber for 7+ years and I see those craps are not changing from like forever.
What’s the point of automate something that you can’t regression test ?
I started thinking that now when most people are facebook wall scrolling zombies companies assume that when new software comes out everyone is installing it right away and if not they’re probably not our customers cause they’re dead.
What a surprise they have when I pay for another year I can only imagine ( to be fair probably they even don’t know who I am ).
Yeah for sure I am subscribed to newsletters and I have jetbrains as a start page cause I shit myself with money and have nothing better to do then be grupie ( is there corporate grupies already a big community? )

Well I am a guy who likes to spend some time when installing anything and especially software that is responsible for my main source of income and productivity speed up.

Anyway I decided to upgrade cause editing es7 and typescript got to be pain in the ass and I see it’s working fine now. I don’t know if I like the font but at least the editor it’s working the same or maybe faster then the original that is huge improvement as developers lose most of their time between keyboard and screen communication protocol.

I don’t write it to discourage intellij as it’s great independent ide that I love and support for such a long time but they should focus on code editor and developers efficiency not on things that doesn’t make sense.

Congratulations if you reached this point of this meaningless post.

Now I started thinking that maybe it’s working faster cause I removed 2 gigs of crap from it.

Well we’ll see.

I inherited a nextjs project from an unknown guy and am fangirling the codebase

But the deeper I familiarise myself with it, the more the cracks begin to appear:

1) The dude Is incapable of grasping the basics of DRY concept. He actually setup a ton of stuff I may have done poorly if I'd started working straight out of the docs, so I feel like I owe him a shower of praise. I guess being new to nextjs makes it look more impressive than it actually is. He was paid off, yet getting the credit seems unearned to me. I'm just afraid reaching out to him might turn around to bite me in the ass
***

I had the above in my drafts, contemplating sending him a token to show some appreciation for unknowingly showing me the ropes. I was going to find him on LinkedIn using his commit names. But after doing everything I've done, undergoing the anxiety and severe pressure I faced at the hands of the project owners, I'm not sharing a farthing with anybody

Yes, I may not have known about zustand and persist middleware. Yes, he did all the ui. Yes, he created the base components and fancy wrappers around form and button html elements. For those, I'm grateful

But the amount of refactoring I had to do to, for an opportunity to implement my own target features, I'd say I can lay as much claim to the project as he does.

Side note #1: I have some newfound respect for front end devs. We used to discriminate against them for doing just css but that was only relevant in the jquery days. Now, they have to use cryptic css frameworks (sass, less, tailwind), they have to learn esoteric syntax of some js framework and write controllers/components as the case may be. They have to (the worst part), bind this data to an API, which would never make sense to me coming from a php ssr-natural world

Back rewarding the guy, some of the challenges I came back from were:

1) Next server outages: I still don't know the workaround this. The app terminates, browser giving an error about using up memory. I have to wait for about 10 minutes before I can access the app again

2) spring Webflux authentication not hydrating: I was unexpectedly asked to work on the back end too, where I got tortured with this horrifying condition. The most poorly documented framework for the Web has no upto date guide on how to implement jwt security measures. I opened a question on stackoverflow. A day later, both my question and the helpful answer got downvoted

3) Zustand not retrieving any data from localstorage once page reloads, until I miraculously stumbled on a hack: there's a config callback for reading state after rehydration or thereabout. So I interact with the state there. That's the only way content clearly in localstorage can get transmuted into dynamic format accessible by the code

4) Mongo database suddenly disconnecting: for no apparent reason, this bailed. Accessible on compass. This was even when I realised it was responsible for front end requests not going through. Eventually created a new database and requests surprisingly began connecting again. Thankfully, my laravel background taught me about seeders so I had them on standby from the onset. Wasn't difficult to just port to a fresh database after confirming the first one was inaccessible to the app

After this painful odyssey and the time constraints, threats of moving forward with someone else, I deserve every dime they deem me worthy of and more

The global joke of Information Security

So I broke my iPhone because the nuclear adhesive turned my display into a shopping bag.

This started the ride for my character arc in this boring dystopia novel:

Amazon is preventing me from accessing my account because they want my password, email AND mobile phone number in their TWO.STEP Verifivation.
Just because one too many scammers managed to woo one too many 90+y/o's into bailing their long lost WW2 comrades from a nigerian jail with Amazon gift cards and Amazon doesn't know what to do about anymore,

DHL is keeping my new phone in a "highly secure" vault 200m away from my place, waiting for a letter to register some device with a camera because you need to verify your identity with an app,

all the while my former car insurance is making regress claims of about 7k€ against me for a minor car accident (no-one hurt fortunately, but was my fault).

Every rep from each of the above had the same stupid bitchass scapegoat to create high-tech supra chargers to the account deletion request:

- Amazon: We need to verify your password, whether the email was yours and whether the phone number is yours.

They call it 2-step-verification.

Guess what Amazon requests to verify you before contacting customer support since you dont have access to your number? Your passwoooooord. While youre at it, click on that button we sent you will ya? ...

I call this design pattern the "dement Tupi-Guarani"

- DHL: We need an ID to verify your identity for the request for changing the delivery address you just made. Oh you wanted to give us ANOTHER address than the one written on your ID? Too bad bro, we can't help, GDPR

- Car Insurance: We are making regress claims against you, which might throw you back to mom's basement, oh and also we compensated the injured party for something else, it doesn't matter what it is but it's definitely something, so our claims against you just raised by 1.2k. Wait you want proof we compensated something to the injured at all? Nah mate we cant do that , GDPR. But trust me, those numbers are legit, my quant forecasted the cost of childrens' christmas wishes. You have 14 days or we'll see you in court haha

I am also their customer in a pension scheme. Something special to Germany, where you save some taxes but have to pay them back once you get the fund paid out. I have sent them a letter to terminate the contract.

Funniest thing is, the whole rant is my second take. Because when I hit the post button, devrant made me verify my e-mail. The text was gone afterwards. If someone from devRant reads this, you are free to quote this in the ticket description.

Fuck losing your virginity, or filing your first tax return, or by God get your first car, living through this sad Truman dystopia without going batshit insane is what becoming a true adult is.

I am grateful for all this though:

Amazon's safety measures prevented me from spending the money I can use to conclude the insurance odyssey, and DHLs "giving a fuck about customers" prevention policies made me support local businesses. And having ranted all this here does feel healthy too. So there's that.

Oh, cherry on top. I cant check my balance, because I can only verify my login requests to my banking account wiiiiiiith...?

Show a comment field below a discussion, with rich text and link functionality, to inspire people to craft a detailed answer.

Maybe they will forget to type Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C before hitting send.

So when they do, show a message that "you must be logged in to comment". Use a JS SPA to make sure that there is no way for users to restore their drafted comment. Don't show it after they logged in. When they use their browser's back button, they surely want to exit the application, so make sure to discard any transient data in that case.

Seen on WordPress.org using their infamous Gutenberg block editor.

I am a good person. I can even say I am a good programmer. I have worked hard to get where I am and that shows perseverance. Although, where I am right now is not what I expected, I am somewhere. I can do something. I have good intentions.

Someday, I will build software which will be used by millions of people around the interwebs. And they will love me, for I will have made their lives better....in some way. Some will even consider paying me for it. Not because the well placed and non intrusive donate button I put there, but out of pure adoration and bare necessity to preserve someone as brilliant and precious as me. I shall be the definition of success. But I long for neither adoration nor wealth, for I am humble or at least that is how I will be perceived.

Like flies to the honey my success will attract big evil corporations to acquire my business. And I shall spit on their wretched face....at first. I would like to be wooed. Such display of integrity shall inspire generations of programmers. Let ye be inspired. There will be those who envy my achievements and they will be mocked and shunned by my true believers. But being the kind soul that I am, I will bring back my minions, for it could a PR nightmare.

All these events will take place in a not too distant future. Sure, I am going through a dark time now, it will pass. 'tis nothing but me transitioning from a lame ass PHP coder moth to this totally badass software engineer who is also a cool bro. This eclipse of my brain shall pass. My neurons will fire in all directions like photons from the sun during late winter, for it may overheat and we definitely don't want that.

I pray to the gods of engineering to grant my wishes. Trust me guys, you will be thanking yourselves when donate my money to charities that will help me set up. But that's another scheme. Amen.

f it ain't broke, don't fix it!
I feared my Android phone's touchscreen suffered severe damage from using it in the rain, until I discovered that the 3-button navigation stopped working after an Android 12 security update (both in Nova launcher as well as in official Google Pixel launcher). Wasted time drying the unplugged phone and googling for repair options before finally wasting more time changing system settings back and forth, rebooting, changing system settings, rebooting, etc.
Remember those happy times before mobile phones have been invented, which of course I don't really want back either. I just want developers to stop breaking features that used to work. Regression testing outside the happy path, anyone? I mean, it's not a hacked maker project, it's a commercial phone that I bought and intend to use with the latest official software. Don't want to think about the next breaking changes that Android 13 might bring.

Feature request: swipe from rant to go back to list of rants. It would be easier than reaching up for the "back" button.

I've had a Xiaomi Mi 8 for a few months now. Although I'm impressed by what I got for the amount I paid (a phone that cost about $250 for 6GB RAM, Snapdragon 845, Android 9 and premium build quality is quite a steal), it definitely comes with a consequence.

MIUI (specifically MIUI 11) is godawful. It is single-handedly the worst Android ROM I've ever used since my shitty Android 2.2 phone back around 2010. If you're gonna buy a Xiaomi phone, plan to install Lineage OS on it (but even that's a pain which I'll explain why later).

- Navigation buttons don't hide while watching a video.

Why? God only knows. The ONLY way to bypass without root this is to use its garbage fullscreen mode with gestures, which is annoying as all hell.

- 2 app info pages?

Yeah, the first one you can access just by going to its disaster of a settings app, apps, manage apps and tap on any one.

The 2nd one you can access through the app info button in any 3rd party launcher. Try this: Download Nova launcher, go to the app drawer, hold on any app and tap "app info", and you'll see the 2nd one.

Basically, instead of modifying Android's FOSS source code, they made a shitty overlay. These people are really ahead of their time.

- Can only set lock screen wallpapers using the stock Gallery app

It's not that big an issue, until it is, when whatever wallpaper app you're using only allows you to set the wallpaper and not download them. I think this is both a fuckup on Xiaomi and (insert wallpaper app name here), but why Xiaomi can't include this basic essential feature that every other Android ROM ever made has is beyond me.

- Theming on MIUI 11 is broken

Why do they even bother having a section to customize the boot animation and status bar when there's not one goddamn theme that supports it? At this point you're only changing the wallpaper and icon pack which you can do on any Android phone ever. Why even bother?

They really, REALLY want to be Apple.

Just look at their phones. They're well designed and got good specs, but they don't even care anymore about being original. The notch and lack of a headphone jack aren't features, they're tremendous fuckups by the dead rotting horse known as Apple that died when Steve Jobs did.

Xiaomi tries to build a walled garden around an inherently customizable OS, and the end result is a warzone of an Android ROM that begs for mercy from its creator. Launchers integrate horribly (Does any power user actually use anything that isn't Nova or Microsoft launcher?), 3rd party themes and customization apps need workarounds, some apps don't work at all. People buy from Xiaomi to get a high end budget Android phone at the price of some ads and data collection, not a shitter iOS wannabe.

They really, REALLY want you to have a sim card

If you don't have a sim card and you're using your phone for dev stuff, you're a 2nd class citizen to Xiaomi. Without one, you can't:

- Install adb through adb
- Write to secure settings
- Unlock your bootloader and get away from this trash Android ROM

What's the point? Are they gonna shadow ban you? Does anyone contact them to unlock their bootloader saying "yeah I wanna use a custom rom to pirate lizard porn and buy drugs"? They made this 1000000000x harder than it needs to be for no reason whatsoever. Oh yeah and you gotta wait like a week or something for them to unlock it. How they fucked up this bad is beyond me.

So yeah. Xiaomi. Great phones, atrocious OS.

Got one right now, no idea if it’s the “most” unrealistic, because I’ve been doing this for a while now.

Until recently, I was rewriting a very old, very brittle legacy codebase - we’re talking garbage code from two generations of complete dumbfucks, and hands down the most awful codebase I’ve ever seen. The code itself is quite difficult to describe without seeing it for yourself, but it was written over a period of about a decade by a certifiably insane person, and then maintained and arguably made much worse by a try-hard moron whose only success was making things exponentially harder for his successor to comprehend and maintain. No documentation whatsoever either. One small example of just how fucking stupid these guys were - every function is wrapped in a try catch with an empty catch, variables are declared and redeclared ten times, but never used. Hard coded credentials, hard coded widths and sizes, weird shit like the entire application 500ing if you move a button to another part of the page, or change its width by a pixel, unsanitized inputs, you name it, if it’s a textbook fuck up, it’s in there, and then some.

Because the code is so damn old as well (MySQL 8.0, C#4, and ASP.NET 3), and utterly eschews the vaguest tenets of structured, organized programming - I decided after a month of a disproportionate effort:success ratio, to just extract the SQL queries, sanitize them, and create a new back end and front end that would jointly get things where they need to be, and most importantly, make the application secure, stable, and maintainable. I’m the only developer, but one of the senior employees wrote most of the SQL queries, so I asked for his help in extracting them, to save time. He basically refused, and then told me to make my peace with God if I missed that deadline. Very helpful.

I was making really good time on it too, nearly complete after 60 days of working on it, along with supporting and maintaining the dumpster fire that is the legacy application. Suddenly my phone rings, and I’m told that management wants me to implement a payment processing feature on the site, and because I’ve been so effective at fixing problems thus far, they want to see it inside of a week. I am surprised, because I’ve been regularly communicating my progress and immediate focus to management, so I explain that I might be able to ship the feature by end of Q1, because rather than shoehorn the processor onto the decrepit piece of shit legacy app, it would be far better to just include it in the replacement. I add that PCI compliance is another matter that we must account for, and so there’s not a great chance of shipping this in a week. They tell me that I have a month to do it…and then the Marketing person asks to see my progress and ends up bitching about everything, despite the front end being a pixel perfect reproduction. Despite my making everything mobile responsive, iframe free, secure and encrypted, fast, and void of unpredictable behaviors. I tell her that this is what I was asked to do, and that there should have been no surprises at all, especially since I’ve been sending out weekly updates via email. I guess it needed more suck? But either way, fuck me and my two months of hard work. I mean really, no ego, I made a true enterprise grade app for them.

Short version, I stopped working on the rebuild, and I’m nearly done writing the payment processor as a microservice that I’ll just embed as an iframe, since the legacy build is full of those anyway, and I’m being asked to make bricks without straw. I’m probably glossing over a lot of finer points here too, just because it’s been such an epic of disappointment. The deadline is coming up, and I’m definitely going to make it, now that I have accordingly reduced the scope of work, but this whole thing has just totally pissed me off, and left a bad taste about the organization.